Recovering the student voice: retention and achievement on foundation degrees.

The first year student experience has a very high profile as a topic in contemporary higher education but how much do we know about what our students really think about their first learning experiences on their Foundation degrees? Recovery of the student voice is an area that Foundation degree practitioners need to consider as part of our strategy to improve the quality of student learning. Our research is located within a form of the interpretivist tradition. Although we would not wish to deny the importance of structural factors in society, we regard knowledge as being constructed through an understanding that different people and groups, in different power relationships, experience the world in different ways. As we argue later, it is important to give voice to the experience of the least powerful

"Just coming in the door was hard": supporting students with mental health difficulties

A student in your writing center displays such high level of anxiety that it also begins to impact on those working in the writing center. The student's behavior might tip over into the unacceptably aggressive and thus provoke a sharp response from the writing center director. Is this just everyone having a bad day or could it indicate a much deeper problem?. Students with mental health difficulties have been a growing concern for us in recent years in our study support team in a UK university. The UK Higher Education Statistics Agency indicates that, in 2003-4, 12.03% of the total numbers of students declaring a disability disclosed a mental health problem. In our college, LCC (London College of Communication, University of the Arts London), our statistics showed that 29.5% of our students, declaring a disability, had disclosed a mental health issue by the end of the same academic year. We are at present half way through our 2005-6 academic year and that number has increased to 37.14% of our students with disabilities. Students will frequently not disclose their disability before they apply because they are worried that they may not be accepted onto the program or even because the initial onse

Mrs Mop Does Magic

In this article we explore the relationship between study support teachers and those teaching on courses. Our focus is on the UK but we believe our findings to have wider relevance. Writing practitioners are part of the academy, not separate from it, and we need to understand and theorize the relationships between our own community and our course teacher colleagues. We regard the perceptions we have of each other as important because student learning is helped by a productive, co-operative and collaborative relationship between study support teachers and course teachers. The latter communicate with students both explicitly and implicitly their views on study support. Relationships between these groups of teachers are likely to be improved by an understanding of the views and prejudices we have of each other and their origins (Blythman and Orr 2003)

Strategic Approaches to the Development and Management of Personal Tutorial Systems in UK Higher Education

This chapter explores our experience, over nine years, of taking a strategic approach to personal tutoring within University of the Arts London. University of the Arts London comprises (at time of writing) five colleges and is specialist within the disciplines of art, design and communication. It is the biggest art and design educational institution in Europe and possibly the world. The chapter outlines the positive development we have been able to achieve in some colleges of the university and the tensions and difficulties encountered

Learning from the past? : a study of perceptions of academic staff in UK higher education of the longer-term impact of subject review on their professional world

This study explores the relationship between the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) subject review (SR), notions of continuing professional development and transformational change in academic staff. In a previous study (Blythman 2001) I explored the immediate experience of SR as perceived by academic staff. The current study examines the longer-term impact on academic staff and their professional world, a complex mix of professional life, knowledge, attitudes, practice, skills and values. I examine through qualitative interviews with 23 academics from11 different institutions whether they perceive SR to have contributed to longer-term changes in their professional world.\ud I explore higher education as a site of conflict based on macro issues of wider social division and micropolitical issues of power and power relations. I offer a detailed reading of particular contexts including the role of agency and a Foucauldian model of the operation of technologies both repressively and creatively. These technologies include academic identity and professionalism, and the operation of power through resources including time.\ud I consider that people experience the world in different ways, contingent on contextualised power relations. The social world is understood through diverse perspectives and this is best captured through the voice of social actors. My main data, therefore, were collected through semi-structured interviews.\ud My study shows that SR had positive aspects for some including increased reflection and deeper pedagogic thinking. Generally, however, the way in which SR was constructed damaged its own stated objectives. This happened through a conflation of information with knowledge, encouraging the hegemony of one model of teaching, diverting resource to second-order activities and encouraging institutional conformity and bureaucratisation. This resulted in institutional and individual behaviour which foregrounded compliance and fabrication. I finish by critically exploring alternatives suggested in current literature and tentatively suggest a future approach. 3 \u

Mind the Gap: expectations, ambiguity and pedagogy within art and design in higher education

This chapter explores the nature and impact of student and tutor expectations and identifies a number of gaps between these expectations that offer particular pedagogic challenges. Commonly these gaps are attributed to student failure to adapt or understand the challenges presented to them within the art and design higer education environment. However, we would argue that in not accepting the responsibility to provide a 'safe' transitional framework, we may be failing some students. This chapter describes a series of transitions that art and design students must negotiate as they move between the compulsory and post-compulsory education sector and between higher education and employment within the creative industries sector. These transitions are key points where gaps in expectations become evident and where we as educators need to undertake further work to support our students as they enter and exit further and higher education. The authors discuss those expectations, illustrated with a student vignette, and propose some ways forward for the 'wicked problems'of the often ambiguous and open-ended nature of learning tasks in art and design