Seeing ourselves as our students see us: the personal development tutor experience through the lens of student as producer

Abstract

This practice paper outlines the experience of a student as producer in relation to a final-year dissertation. The student-producer researched the perceptions and experiences of fellow students in relation to personal development tutors in a social sciences subject group. The authors argue that: 1) student research about academic staff is beneficial because it enables student interviewees to talk more openly; 2) presenting the findings to academic staff is an essential outcome; 3) research of this kind has more credibility owing to the more equal status between [student] interviewer and [student] interviewee. The paper concludes that students as producers could enhance institutional reflexivity.

Key words:

• personal development
• student engagement
• dissertation

Introduction

The dissertation (or honours project as it is called at our university) that final-year undergraduates complete is an excellent example of student as producer. In an ideal situation, the topic researched is relevant to the supervisor’s interests and may feed into teaching in subsequent years. It relates to the idea of student as producer and encourages the development of collaborative relations between student and academic in the production of knowledge (Neary and Winn 2009). It may also be directly relevant to students’ future careers, either as preparation for further study or through investigating a specific area of work: for example, one former student researched the experiences of staff involved in supporting women who had suffered domestic abuse (an area she wanted to work in), which led to employment on graduation. However, in the case discussed in this paper, the research findings were relevant to all academic staff in the school and have been used by the university to inform new lecturers during their induction period. This paper is based on the findings of an undergraduate researcher who explored student experiences of personal development tutors (PDTs) in the School of Life, Sport and Social Sciences in a post-1992 university in Scotland. ¹ We discuss the experiences of supervisor and supervisee in that project.

Background

Ailsa first met Emma as a first-year undergraduate on the BA Social Sciences, teaching her on the compulsory Introduction to Sociology module. Ailsa was module leader as well as a class tutor and Emma was in one of her tutorial groups. Although Emma had a different PDT, they met regularly on campus throughout her degree, both casually and on different modules that Ailsa taught later in Emma’s degree. Emma ‘adopted’ Ailsa as an extra informal PDT. Related to this ‘adoption’ was the fact that Emma was in a wheelchair because of cerebral palsy (CP) and neuromuscular scoliosis (NS). As their relationship developed, Ailsa learned more about the impact of Emma’s disability on her daily life as well as the intermittent insecurities that came from being a bright, diligent student. When Ailsa became supervisor for Emma’s research project, both sides were perfectly content. The aims of the project were to explore student experiences of personal development tutors. This is discussed in further detail, below. Emma had every confidence that if some of her findings were less than flattering to staff, Ailsa would encourage her to write them up without any dilution of the details. This was a concern for Emma because she knew from conversations with fellow students that PDTs were viewed in very different lights and she was conscious that some of her findings could impinge on staff sensibilities. ² Ailsa also had concerns about reading anonymised interview transcripts; there would be a very strong temptation to play ‘spot myself and my colleagues’. However, she had had prior experience of carrying out potentially sensitive research with students for a C-SAP-funded project on staff and student experiences of feedback and assessment (Gill, Sutton and Hollinshead 2009), and some of the findings of that project fed into her own interest in supervising Emma’s project.

Institutional background

Before talking in more detail about student as producer, it is important to provide a few background details. In our social science subject area, when students arrive in the first year, they are allocated a PDT who will stay with them throughout the course of their degree. This is not related to any particular module and it is possible to be a PDT without teaching a student during their degree. A PDT is expected to contact students and meet with them at least twice a year in each trimester. The main aim of the job is to help students engage with their studies and develop into well-rounded human beings with a good degree. Being a PDT is not seen as a counselling role, as can be seen from the guidelines that Edinburgh Napier staff are asked to follow: personal development planning should “have the enhancement of student academic achievement, career planning and personal development as its core aim” (http://staff.napier.ac.uk/services/sas/student_development/PDP/Pages/PDPDocuments.aspx). Most staff email their students, inviting them to an individual meeting. Some students never respond to emails and as a result a PDT may not see them during their degree. Others only make contact towards the end of the second or third year, especially if their marks are not improving in the way they had hoped.

Research background

Emma had regular contact with her PDT because the frequent pain associated with CP and NS impacted on her ability to study and therefore on her confidence. She also ‘adopted’ Ailsa as an additional support. This involved informal conversations about a broad range of issues that impacted on her studies and her frequent thoughts about dropping out of university. Listening and providing reassurance were the most important elements of these conversations. ³ Emma was frequently frustrated when talking to other students about various issues that were affecting their studies; many of them did not go to their PDTs and she was responsible for persuading a number of them to do so. By the time of her honours project she had decided that she wanted to investigate why it was that some students actively engaged with their PDTs and others did not. While staff and students were encouraged by the university to be actively involved in the process, the university seemed to be very unaware as to why some students did not engage. From Ailsa’s perspective, it seemed that staff were perceived as not being diligent enough in trying to contact students and there was little institutional awareness of students’ views of the process.

The research project

Emma conducted a small, qualitative research project using semi-structured interviews with students in the school. The project was based on an interpretative methodology. The sample consisted of eight students who had all seen their PDT at least twice (with the exception of one student who only had one face-to-face meeting with her PDT but had maintained frequent email contact). First-year students were excluded from the sample on the grounds that they would have only seen their PDTs once by the time data collection took place. Like all other honours projects at the university, the project was approved by the university’s ethics committee. The School of Life, Sport and Social Sciences was chosen, not only as convenience sampling but because each school has a slightly different way of organising the allocation of PDTs. Emma also wanted the research to be beneficial to her school, and there was more likelihood of generalisability in these circumstances. Her research question was: “How do students understand the role of their personal development tutor and what are their experiences of interacting with them?” The more detailed aims of the project were to establish:

• perceptions of the role of the PDT and their experiences of PDTs;

• effectiveness of communication with the PDT;

• factors influencing help-seeking;

• usefulness of support/advice from PDT.

Reference has already been made to the earlier project conducted by Ailsa. In that situation, when students wanted to say something negative about staff in relation to feedback, they tended not to name staff but give an example that was usually followed by: “I’m sure you know who I’m talking about.” What was noticeable in Emma’s project was that her being a student meant there was no necessity for such coyness. This relates to Healy and Jenkins’ comments about “developing students as participants in research and inquiry, so that they are producers, not just consumers of knowledge” (2009: sec 2.6). The openness that emerged in the interviews resulted in the production of knowledge, which would be beneficial to staff and students. More important, it was knowledge that was unlikely to have been produced (and therefore not available even at the consumption level) had it not been conducted by a student.

Obviously, students acquire interviewing skills while conducting research and they also hone their critical and interpretative skills. What was less obvious to the supervisor at the start was the impact of the interview transcripts. As had been suspected, ‘spot the colleague/me’ figured strongly but it was the strength of the self-reflexivity that was the most rewarding part of this experience. There was something more persuasive and less stressful knowing that the students had no need to be anything other than honest because they were talking to a fellow student. This was in sharp contrast to hearing the same thing from a colleague, wondering just how honest the student had been with them and querying their conclusions. It also raised some very uncomfortable questions about why there was so much suspicion about findings of research conducted in the university where staff interviewed students. This is not the place to provide an answer.

It was clear from reading the transcripts (which were anonymised when Ailsa read them) that students’ knowledge that they were talking to a fellow student and not to a member of staff gave Emma the opportunity to probe more deeply and to make suitably sympathetic responses without there being any fear that they may be upsetting her. For example, one student told Emma that she did not get on with the person who was originally assigned to be her PDT and was very frank about the lack of a connection between them:

“I think there was one time she didn’t even recognise me when I walked past her … like they didn’t even know I was their PDT! Do you know what I mean?”

Another student was also honest with Emma regarding her relationship with her PDT:

“It wasn’t anything she did wrong but I didn’t feel we connected on a personal level at all.”

Another student in Emma’s sample was very open about the fact that some staff members were known among the students in the school as being ‘bad’ PDTs:

“I think there are some PDTs out there that are quite bad at their role.”

With students as producers, it is clear that it is much easier for a student to include critical comments about their PDT because a staff member might be seen as being disloyal to their colleagues if they were to do the same. This goes back to our earlier point that students as producers actually produce knowledge that may not be available to staff researchers; it therefore remains unavailable for consumption, and without consumption there would be little point in endless production.

Key findings

The findings were extremely interesting for a number of reasons. First, they were well grounded theoretically. The concepts of symbolic power (Bourdieu 1992) and presentation of self (Goffman 1990) were mentioned as being important in the project’s literature review and were clearly visible in many of the statements made by the project participants. The findings were also supportive of our instinctive feeling that ‘staff not making enough effort’ or ‘students just not understanding’ were insufficient explanations for student non-engagement. They also provided some very practical information because Emma was a student producer - it appeared that students were more candid talking to another student than they would have been if it had been a member of staff interviewing them. What did Emma find? The majority of students wanted to have a close relationship with their PDTs that was based on honesty (not being afraid to tell the student they were doing badly but to offer support for improvement, and to reassure them when they were doing well); trust (so that they could share issues that were not solely academic but were impacting on their studies, and either be given good guidance or pointed towards an appropriate alternative source); and empathy (feeling able to communicate easily with a degree of friendship, though always with an awareness of the status distinction between staff and students: this appeared to be valued because it implied authoritative knowledge and relates back to the point about symbolic power). A further issue was availability: ie responding within a reasonable timescale to emails. Where these key points were missing, students voted with their feet and did not maintain contact with their PDTs.

It was also clear that, for many students, the model of independent learner, which has been widely embraced by academic institutions, militated against students seeking guidance because they felt they would be seen as lazy or stupid and not independent. This was linked to the concepts of presentation of self (Goffman 1990) and the independent learner (Leathwood 2006). For example, one student explained to Emma that she often hesitated to go to her PDT for assistance because she preferred to deal with problems on her own and did not want her PDT to know she was having problems:

“A just dinnie like to bother people … dinnie like other people to know that I’ve got a problem.”

Another student explained to Emma that she hadn’t gone to her PDT for assistance with a particular issue because she was worried that he would think she was stupid:

“I just worry that I’m gonna come off as … silly … like I don’t know what I’m doing.”

This was a significant finding in relation to our own university’s approach, which emphasises the academic role of the PDT at the expense of the emotional factors that are clearly entwined for the students. For further discussion related to models of personal development planning and student-tutor relationships, see Clegg and Bradley (2006), Hixenbaugh, Pearson and Williams (2006) and Stephen, O’Connell and Hall (2008). In terms of students as producers, we believe that it was Emma’s status as a fellow student that allowed the students in her sample who had chosen not to seek help from their PDTs to be honest with her about the reasons behind this decision. We discuss the overall significance of research projects that embrace student as producer in our conclusion.

Dissemination of findings

A short while after submission, Ailsa recommended that Emma be invited to present her findings at a school learning and teaching awayday. While other guest speakers often came to these days, students had never been invited before and there was a degree of nervousness on the part of supervisor and supervisee. From Ailsa’s perspective, Emma and her findings were very well received, precisely because they came from a student and not from a colleague. Colleagues were commenting for quite some time afterwards, particularly in relation to some of the more structurally related issues that came out of Emma’s recommendations. As a result of this event, another colleague passed Emma’s name on to the academic development team. She was invited to make a podcast alongside members of university staff about good practice for PDTs that would be used on the induction course for all new lecturers: http://staff.napier.ac.uk/services/hr/development/acprofdev/induction/welcome/Pages/episode7.aspx (click on episode 7 when the link opens).

Conclusion

The most important element of this project and the whole experience of student as producer was the removal of potential sensitivity around the research findings. There is a risk, when staff research their own and their colleagues’ professional practice, of being seen as partial in some way. Given the very mixed feelings that staff have about being a PDT, this is not particularly surprising. Staff have no choice about their involvement in the PDT system and, depending on teaching loads, PDT duties can seem like yet another intrusion into the limited time available for research or just thinking. It can also be extremely frustrating when students do not respond to invitations to meet with their PDT. Methodologically, it raises issues about researcher effects and the power imbalance that exists between staff and students. This is a phenomenon that has been clearly articulated in the academic literature. For example, in the words of Bourdieu, “Teachers … are empowered universally to subject the linguistic performance of speaking subjects to examination and to the legal sanction of academic qualification” (Bourdieu 1992: 45). Elsewhere, Bourdieu talks about the role of habitus and its relationship to patterns of behaviour, which are clearly related to students’ perceptions of the power imbalance of the staff/student relationship:

The habitus, as a system of dispositions to a certain practice, is an objective basis for regular modes of behaviour, and thus for regularity modes of practice, and if practices can be predicted... this is because the effect of habitus is that agents who are equipped with it will behave in a certain way in certain circumstances. (Bourdieu 1990a: 77)

Furthermore, according to Bourdieu, habitus is expressed through ways “of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking” (1990b: 70).

A student conducting research on other students’ experiences of the PDT not only removes that power imbalance (particularly when staff knew the research had to have addressed methodological concerns in order to receive the first-class mark that it did) but also enables more intimate engagement with the interviewees and the subsequent data. For Emma, her desire to produce academic debate at the university about something for which she had very strong feelings was an integral part of the research and the opportunity to disseminate her findings went some way to fulfilling that goal.

One of the most important aspects of the whole project for Emma was the relationship between her and Ailsa. While there was respect and affection, trust was especially significant. Trust that, no matter what she found - for example if the whole system was seen as a disaster and barely anyone had a positive word to say about it - she would not be censored or penalised for saying so. A limitation of the honours project/dissertation in relation to students as producers is that it happens at the end of the student’s degree. Some modules provide students with the opportunity to engage in a mini-research project as part of their assessment, but in terms of students researching university practice, this project appears to be unique to the school.

In the university as a whole, there is a great deal of developmental policy work being done in relation to the QAA enhancement theme, Developing and Supporting the Curriculum. This is still in progress. Early documents seem to indicate that, while there is awareness of the student as producer model, there is more emphasis on the 3-E framework: enhance, extend, empower. There is also considerable emphasis on employability and the external political factors that impinge on the HE sector in Scotland, most notably the changes that are taking place for children aged 3 to18 through the Curriculum for Excellence (Fotheringham, Strickland and Aitchison 2012). The more radical and politically challenging views that underpin the work of Neary and Winn (2009) and Healey and Jenkins (2009) are less noticeable. Nevertheless, we do provide an open access online resource bank where staff are encouraged to submit examples of student engagement that often fit the idea of student as producer (Edinburgh Napier University Resource Bank). There is an argument for saying that all universities could fruitfully engage students earlier in their degrees in research projects about varying aspects of student experiences of universities. This would be part of an ongoing institutional reflexivity that benefits from an insider perspective and contributes to greater development of the student as producer model.

Biography

Dr Ailsa Hollinshead is a sociology lecturer who teaches the modules Introductory Sociology, Sexuality and Gender, and Social Identities. She is a personal development tutor and year leader for second-year undergraduates on the BA Social Sciences programme and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA). She has a broad interest in pedagogic research and has also researched the role of the media in relation to social inclusion/exclusion. She is Director of the Edinburgh International Film Audiences Conference.

Emma McKendrick is 22 years old and graduated from university in June 2011 with an honours degree in social sciences. She has a passion for sociology, with a particular interest in the sociology of education. She hopes to go on to further study and eventually to develop a career in an academia. Emma is keen to use her experiences to help other students.

Notes

¹ In Scotland, students study for four years for an honours degree. The honours project is 10,000 words.

² References to staff sensibilities and responses to discussions of university policies throughout this article are based on the perceptions of the two authors, as opposed to any concrete ‘facts’. Suffice to say that students are not always flattering in their reactions to different members of staff and staff can have their own internal tensions.

³ It is worth mentioning that ‘adopting’ an additional PDT was somewhat unusual. One of the findings of the research project was that ‘adoption’ only tended to happen when a student did not respond well to their PDT (either because of an experience or because of comments they had heard from other students) and when requesting a new PDT was perceived to have been dealt with unsympathetically.

Edinburgh Napier University Resource Bank. Available at: http://staff.napier.ac.uk/services/academicdevelopment/LTA/Pages/LTA.aspx (accessed 27 May 2012).

PDP-PDT diagram. Student Development, Edinburgh Napier University. Available at: http://staff.napier.ac.uk/services/sas/student_development/PDP/Pages/PDPDocuments.aspx (accessed February 2011/May 2012).