This week Quality Assurance Agency Scotland is running its Enhancement Themes conference, which is a great opportunity to meet staff and student union colleagues from across the Scottish sector and also international visitors from farther afield. I have attended the conference the last two years (see my reflections on last year's conference) and this year have only been able to attend the first two days of the conference but wanted to share my reflections on the presentations and discussions thus far.
The conference got off to a great start with a keynote address by Peter Felten from Elon University who I know through his great work on student/staff partnerships in developing the curriculum as well as his related work on transformational learning and student success in university. Peter warned against moves from the private sector to ‘unbundle’ higher education to focus solely on developing students’ competencies and skills in a consumer-focused, marketised manner. He highlighted how underserved students fare worst in unbundled, unstructured education (and succeed with structure and community and clear pathways to goals) so those with high social capital are more likely to succeed in an unbundled higher education environment. Peter then focused on his recent work on The Undergraduate Experience which focuses on six key areas: learning, relationships, expectations, alignment, improvement/enhancement, and leadership. By working in partnership with students to motivate them to put in meaningful time and effort on their studies, show them staff have confidence in their abilities, and allow students to practice in a safe community, students will learn how to navigate the complex world we live in today. Peter’s talk inspired the audience and also offered tangible and practical examples to help educators help students in active learning within vibrant academic communities. He used a great analogy of how a relay race team may have fantastic individual competitors, but they may lose the race because of their failure to pass off the baton between themselves; similarly, in higher education we can have silos of excellent practice but the key to success is the integration and coherence of the student experience. I really enjoyed Peter’s keynote, and one of the best parallel sessions was the discussion with Peter of the themes he had raised and the strategies to overcome challenges that we face in different higher education institutions to embed a culture of student/staff partnerships, whether it be through having lunch with students, hiring students as our research assistants, or normalizing office hours in rocking chairs in common areas.
As in other recent years at the Enhancement Themes Conference, it was a great time to learn about innovative initiatives to help students transition into, through, or out of their degree. It was great to hear about Edinburgh Napier Students’ Association’s dissertation conference of talks and workshops for fourth years before starting their dissertation, as well as a University of Glasgow research conference for fourth-year students to present their dissertation work. This gave me lots of food for thought when thinking about developing a Rep Conference for current or previous student representatives to share their work and past successes as well as talks and workshops to help Reps develop their skills and become more motivated in their role.
I also enjoyed learning about Glasgow School of Art’s interactive game ‘How to Fail Your Research Degree’ to help postgrad students think through all of the pieces of their research degree. It was great to reflect on how I could turn something like our Class Rep training into an interactive game following this model to help Class Reps with experiential learning, problem-solving, and understanding the dependencies between different stakeholders in the student representation system. This may also be a fun way to make training more interesting, practical, and rewarding for Reps to work through scenarios and develop confidence in dealing with them, but it could take quite some time to develop (especially if it were to be online!).
I really enjoyed presenting at the conference as well. I tried out the petcha kutcha format with my colleague to present on Measuring Impact in Student Representation: Incentives, Recognition, and Reward. It was a very quick six minutes flying through twenty slides (with only twenty seconds each), but we were able to summarise and share our work on HEAR recognition, Open Badges, the Edinburgh Award for Representing Students, and the Impact Awards for student leaders. By moving to a multi-faceted reward and recognition structure which focuses on the Reps’ active engagement with the role, we could share our work at the Students’ Association to incentivise students towards recording and sharing their impact in the role, rather than simply rewarding them simply for signing up. I was also able to present on the Teaching Awards research project ‘What Does Good Teaching Look Like to Students?’ (see the full report) which was fantastic to share in this venue. The research highlights the themes of student perceptions of excellent teaching and student support. Since we have shared the work quite a lot across the University of Edinburgh, it was great to share it with colleagues across the sector and to receive the feedback ‘Great work… Student-defined excellence is absolutely leading the conversation in Scotland’ showing how students and Students’ Associations have so much to contribute to discussions around teaching excellence.
Although it was not a particular focus of the conference, I enjoyed the discussions in sessions and on the twitter wall which emerged around students as partners. Peter Felten suggested that staff can have more conversations about the qualities of the best students they have taught, Megan Brown highlighted how many staff nominate student leaders in the Impact Awards, and Matt Adie and Amy Eberlin highlighted (like I did in my talk) the importance of students recognizing excellent staff. Mushtak Al-Atabi emphasised the importance of seeing others not as ‘the other’ but as a resource and expressing gratitude for others (which is correlated with happiness). He argued that this will help us to work together with emotional intelligence and cognitive intelligence to build bridges and solve some of the massive global challenges we’re facing today. Dragan Gasevic discussed digital skill development and awareness for both students and staff, and how learning analytics data can help both students and staff. It can help students achieve their potential and staff to improve their teaching practices to better reach and engage students, and how it is important to involve different stakeholders in these discussions (including students!). NUS Scotland President Vonnie Sandlan urged university staff to work with their student representatives and student unions to improve the student experience. It was also great to hear Sally Mapstone mention an example of students and staff working together in a liberation of the curriculum project and say: ‘We ask our students to go out of their comfort zones and to challenge themselves, and we must ask ourselves [as staff] to do the same.’ That was really powerful for me to hear, and is key to the positive, open mindset of working with students as partners.
The Enhancement Themes international conference is always big and rapid-fire, with large sessions and then six parallel breakout sessions running at the same time. Today discussions will focus on wrapping up the theme of transitions and announcing the next Enhancement Theme, but I had wished that there had been fewer keynote addresses and more time for discussion-based sessions or workshops to reflect on what we as a sector have learnt from the theme of transitions, take stock of how far we’ve come in the last three years, and also not beat around the bush about what other work there is yet to do in this area. The Twitter discussions also highlighted some bubbling areas of contention or worry, such as how much time enhancement activities and partnership work takes both staff and students albeit to great success in the end. There were other questions around what expectations are for student engagement (engagement for giving feedback bribed by pizza for example, versus reciprocal partnership work throughout a project and a transparent sharing of outcomes). Someone also tweeted how student/staff partnership is not a new concept and we’ve been talking about it in Scotland for many years, yet there still seem to be barriers in fully embedding it in learning and teaching (beyond involvement of Sabbatical Officers). I hope my PhD research will help to understand the benefits and challenges of partnership work in co-creation of the curriculum, but it would have been a great time to discuss some of these deeper issues at this conference to wrap up the theme of transitions. That said, it was a very enjoyable conference to network, celebrate some of the great working taking place across the sector, and provide some food for thought.
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