Assessment, Learning & Teaching Reflections |
Monday 5 December
The student experience is enormously complex. Patterns and styles of learning; assumptions, expectations, engagement, attendance and blurring of full-time, part-timer, international, home and mature students can all promulgate grounded theories and deficit models. These in turn can be determinants for pedagogic and institutional initiatives.
The HEA Conference: ‘The Contemporary Student’ at the University of Northumbria, with presentations from researchers and, importantly, students utilised ‘thick description’ to great effect. Northumbria’s Chaplain, Andrew Shipton, offered interesting insights. The ongoing quest of the contemporary student is to manage emotions, relationships, challenging and unchallenging work; finances, transitions, misunderstandings and betrayals. Paramount is the quest to reconcile an increasing impression that pre-packaged, orderly, regulated academic input geared towards assessment doesn’t relate to the inward struggles of who the person wants to be. Should we do more to harness the energy students use for developing their social world towards academic study? Intensive commodification of HE is just around the corner and may further remould the relationship between students/customers and universities/providers, so understanding tomorrow’s students may become yet more complex. However, one recent graduate gave a salutary reminder: “I felt it important that they knew my name, not just my result”. Whatever happens, the personal touch remains vital.
Peter D’Sena
Principal Lecturer, Teacher Fellow
School of Education & Professional Training
