Working with widening participation at the University of Hertfordshire.

Dr Julie Vuolo, Rachel Nield, Joanna Paul, Tiana Rawlins, Krystian Jakubczyk & Harvinder Sokhal, University of Hertfordshire

In the widening participation team at Herts, we have worked hard to embed student-staff partnership approaches into our everyday working practice. As well as thinking about how student feedback, consultation and co-production activities can inform our programme of work, we have also developed several paid student roles which harness the assets that our widening participation students bring to the university setting. In our micro-video contribution, we outline the mutual benefits of these partnership roles, and our student partners will share how they feel their contribution makes a difference to the work we do. They will also share how they bring their background and experiences to the role as well as what they feel the benefits are to their own personal and professional development.

Emma Whewell & Alison Power, University of Northampton

This study aims to contribute to the field of primary education and inclusive practices by discussing when and how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender plus (LGBT+) education is being taught and what primary school teachers need to feel confident to teach it.  It is not compulsory for LGBT+ content to be taught in primary schools causing conflict for school leaders and an inconsistent approach regarding LGBT+ content and teaching. This poster will explore when teachers feel LGBT+ education should first be taught, what impacts teachers’ confidence, and effective teaching strategies. Findings suggest that most teachers consider LGBT+ education an important and that reception and year one is an ideal point at which to cultivate a respectful and tolerant environment. There is scope to improve initial teacher education and in service training for practicing teachers to build confidence and share practice through subject content knowledge and mentor training.

Read more about the why, how and when of LGBT+ education poster

Investigating practices, experiences and opportunities

Helen Barefoot, University of Hertfordshire

Read more about CAN Conference 2023

Tom Lowe, University of Portsmouth

Read more about how 10 years of students have been making changes in UK Higher Education

Lucy Bamwo, University of Hertfordshire

The University of Hertfordshire has made significant investments over the last 5 years into building their student and staff digital capabilities. Throughout this investment, student/staff partnership has been at the core, with a team of student technology mentors that have led, supported, and driven digital capabilities across the institution since 2017. This session will outline the digital capabilities journey that our students and staff encounter and the initiatives that we have developed in partnership. It will explore how we have obtained investment and senior manager buy in and how we evidence our impact to regenerate the continued and increased investment. We will share the lessons learnt and our plans for continuous digital transformation and partnership culture at the university.

Read more about Investing in Digital Capabilities Spotlight session

Jennifer Hamlin, Gregory Miller, Lucy Bentley, University of Leeds

Whatever a student’s individual journeys, situations and ambitions are, they need access to resources, information and support to know they are valued members of their University community. The development of a consistent Welcome, Induction and Transition programme, underpinned by research and in collaboration and partnership with others, has shown that students’ needs are varied and numerous, from study skills to basic life skills and support in making connections, friends and developing a sense of belonging. It is against this broad mix of educational, practical, wellbeing and pastoral care that a strategic welcome, induction and transition approach delivers and supports students to feel more connected to their School, their programme and their peers. By moving to an embedded year round model of welcome, the University of Leeds is delivering on all of these needs, not just in the weeks immediately before or after arrival, but throughout our students' time at Leeds.

Read more about embedding welcome all year round

An Exploration into a staff-student partnership in learning and teaching

Elodie Wakerley & Shivani Wilson-Rochford, Birmingham City University

This presentation outlines a staff-student co-creation project undertaken to re-design a staff development course at Birmingham City University. Introduction to Learning and Teaching in Higher Education is a staff development course accredited by the Staff and Education Development Association. It serves as a long-standing introduction to traditional and innovative theories of curriculum and assessment design for staff members new to HE, however, had little history of incorporating the student voice within its own design. This presentation will share our experiences of co-creating staff development activities and highlight further opportunities for academic development activities within the wider HE sector.

Read more about co-creation for collaborative curriculum design

Co-creating a student curriculum consultant role

Karen Clark, Temitope Akinsoto, Ameer Hamza, Muhammad Jooman, Abigail Leighton, Prasaath Satha, Neal Geach, University of Hertfordshire

University of Hertfordshire's Getting Ready to Study at Herts MOOC

Amanda Yip, Atif Ahmed, Andrew Burgess, Adeyemi Ogonkuya and Vivian Umossoh-Ime, University of Hertfordshire

Onboarding experience plays a vital role in setting new students entering higher education up for success. The success of this experience has been evidenced to strengthen students’ sense of belonging and engagement with their learning. Here we showcase the University of Hertfordshire – Getting Ready to Study at Herts Pre-induction MOOC that had been co-develop together with students can support successful onboarding experience at Herts. We will also share how the student voice in the review of the overarching narrative of the MOOC provided opportunities for continuous collaboration with students supported the on-going enhancement of the content new students find relevant, important, and engaging.

Read more about Shaping Pre-induction Experiences with Students

The journey of our year together

Jo Eaton, University of Hertfordshire

Practice Sharing 5-minute lightning talk, to showcase the key learnings from the first year of recruiting, and then working with, a team of 24 student Careers Coaches to the University of Hertfordshire’s careers service. Gain perspectives from both Careers staff, and the coaches, who have together developed effective methods of working to best support UH students with their career planning.

Read more about Recruiting and working with 24 student Careers Coaches

Lauren Bolz, Jade Calder and Shreya Dua, University of Oxford

This lightening talk will give a brief overview of one partnership approach that the University of Oxford is taking to understanding what our students’ need to develop their digital capabilities and use digital tools to further their learning experience. By running two student internships—one focused on conducting an educational research project and the other focused on co-creating a proposal for an academic skills support hub—the Centre for Teaching and Learning will work in partnership with students to further ongoing work aimed at developing students’ digital capabilities.

Read more about A partnership approach to understanding students’ digital needs and supporting students’ digital capabilities

Dee Vyas, Nillan Fakira, Manchester Metropolitan University

What is Active Learning? It is important to acknowledge that returning to a pre-pandemic world, without reflection or change, is not realistic. We need a commitment to learn from this period and embrace change where it has the potential to enhance quality and the student experience. One aspect of enhancing the student experience is active learning, "anything that involves students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing" (Bonwell & Eison, 1991, p. 2). Research shows that students engage better through active learning (Healey and Healey, 2019). The Advance HE 52c toolkit provides an approach to active learning and student engagement with a low technology practical resource, designed for any teaching environment whether it is face to face, blended or online. The toolkit focusses to maximise involvement in the learning environment and provide a variety of means to enhance student motivation, using key pedagogic principles underpinning learning and teaching (Evans et al, 2015).

Read more about 52 varieties of student engagement

A collaboration between Students and Staff

Emily Bastable, Jo Holmes, University of Southampton

Like many large institutions, the University of Southampton has great examples of student partnership, but this ethos is not always consistently applied. The Student Voice Toolkit is a collaboration between SUSU and the University of Southampton, and aims to support academic staff, professional services, and project teams to bring the student voice into their work across the institution. The toolkit describes a number of ways in which staff may choose to bring the student voice into change projects and initiatives and gives past examples. The authors of the Student Voice Toolkit: Vice President of Education and Democracy, and the Student Co-Design & Insights Lead, present the toolkit along with the lessons they learnt about student voice when creating it.

Read more about The Student Voice Toolkit

Emma Whewell & Alison Power, University of Northampton

'Engage' offers an innovative approach in alternative education provision from the Northampton Saints Foundation (NSF), which works with students aged 10-18 to increase confidence and self-esteem. Padlet was trialled as a digital passport, to address the young people's dislike of committing their feelings and emotions to paper.  By digitising the passport, barriers to engagement were removed, providing multimodal expressions of thoughts and feelings. Version 2, co-designed with NSF staff, will evaluate the digital artefacts and learning behaviours of the young people to support their next steps in education or work in line with the University of Northampton's social outreach agenda.

Read more about Engaging’ students with education: promoting inclusivity through technology

Zoe Allman, De Montfort University

De Montfort University’s Embedding Mental Wellbeing team were recognised by Advance HE with a Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (2022) for efforts to harness the power of academics, professional services and the Students’ Union in collaborative partnership to embed mental wellbeing activity across the University. Responding to the needs of the University community and the impact of Covid-19, this project has achieved cross-institutional and cross-sector impact. In response to the pandemic the team scoped a project to guarantee delivery of impact by ensuring that embedding mental wellbeing in the curriculum reached, and was accessible to, students across the University. Through new collaborative action the team created wellbeing masterclasses for students, workshops for staff, a series of downloadable tutor packs for use in a variety of taught settings, unique online resources, opportunities for student voice leading to individualised support, and a communication strategy about what was available, and how and why to engage. Zoë will share insights into the collaboration approaches embraced, and reflections on the opportunities, challenges, and outcomes from this activity.

Read more about Wellbeing and a sense of community Spotlight Session

Iro Ntonia & Kate Ippolito, Imperial College London

Our ‘Science of Learning’ Undergraduate students are invited to explore the concept of learning through three different angles; as a biological function of the brain, as a psychological function of the mind, and as a socially situated activity. Our goal is to equip students to critically evaluate the process of learning through these three perspectives, through continuous reflection on their learning experiences, and by learning to analyse the application of these perspectives in a range of HE teaching-related contexts. Engaging in this reflection led students to greater agency of their learning trajectories, and an overall increased sense of awareness of self and others within the same or similar context. In this interactive session, we will present a selection of the activities and prompts we use in our teaching sessions, some preliminary qualitative data based on our past cohorts’ reflections, and we will discuss lessons learnt and next steps.

Read more about Building sustainable psychological wellbeing through an inter-disciplinary elective module on the Science of Learning

Sarah Knight, Elizabeth Newall, Diana Andreea Catana, Jisc

With the impact of the pandemic and uptake of digital in all aspects of the student experience, it has raised the importance of understanding the expectations and experiences that international students have of their digital environment. This session will provide an overview of the factors influencing the digital experience of international students coming to learn in the UK, including national and institutional factors.

Read more about Understanding international students’ digital experience

Amita Nijhawan, Louise Younie, Emily Salines, Ana Cabral, University of the Arts London

Tisdell and Toliver, 2011, say, “for learning to be truly transformative, it must engage one’s whole being…” In a collaboration between the University of the Arts London (UAL) and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), we explore the creativity and power of staff-student partnerships. Each institution engages co-creatively with students. At UAL changemaker students work on diversity and decoloniality with staff. At QMUL students are working co-creatively with educators to enhance the learner experience, developing research on co-creation, peer assessment and flourishing. We argue that for co-creation and student-staff partnerships to be truly transformative and to fully explore their potential, both sides need to have the space to bring their whole selves into the partnership. This includes not only experiences where we have felt supported or understood but equally experiences of bias, anxiety or vulnerability. How can our lived experiences become part of the work we do? How can they inform processes of curriculum development, assessment, peer review and becoming a professional? How can we as staff facilitate this sharing of vulnerable experiences, experiences of inclusion and bias, and create spaces where these can become a healthy and flourishing part of a collaboration or partnership? This session includes our active engagement with questions of identity and lived experiences in our partnerships with students.

Read more about Bringing Your Whole Self into Student Partnerships

Enabling change for students and teachers

Tim Herrick, University of Sheffield

The Student Observation of Teaching scheme has been running successfully at the University of Sheffield since 2017.  In this interactive presentation, staff leaders and participants in the scheme will explain what it is, where it came from, how it works, the impact it has had on all concerned, and what might be helpful insights for others looking to develop their student-staff partnership work. This will lead into a more open discussion and reflection on partnership directly centred around teaching and learning, including collective exploration of how to recognise and structure this work as part of a coherent student experience.  The aim will be to encourage participants to make space for this pedagogical practice within or alongside the curriculum.  The key messages are that student observation of teaching is effective, relatively easy to run, and enjoyable for those who engage with it.

Read more about Student Observation of Teaching

A student-led employability programme led by the University of Portsmouth SU

Tom Lowe, Jade Underwood, Dr Harriet Dunbar-Morris, University of Portsmouth

This case study will report on the innovative Students’ Union (SU) led ‘Seven Steps to Success’ Programme run at the University of Portsmouth, which aims to build employability knowledge and thinking across the student journey. Following election on a manifesto to develop student employability, the Learning Experience Officer, Jade Underwood, worked in partnership with academic schools and the Careers & Employability Service to create a meaningful professional development programme in which information, guidance, co-curricular and extra-curricular activities are tailor-made for each disciplinary area. In other words, there is a bespoke 7S programme for each academic school. The programme exists to support student engagement, with opportunities offered across the institution, and to improve graduate outcomes across 5 pilot academic schools. This presentation will give a project report of the evaluation of the first year of 7S, as well as reflections from both sides of the partnership (University and SU).

Read more The Seven Steps for Success (7S).