I have learned a great deal through this process. It was always my intention to use the ARP as an opportunity to intensively road-test an idea that I’d like to implement into the course in a long-term way, and I have gathered lots practical feedback and suggestions for tweaks and revisions. For example- giving more structure to the third-year mentors to help them feel more confident in their role and moving the time-frame of the programme into the later part of the academic year to avoid overloading those writing their dissertations, and to allow all that want to take part to do so.
These are all useful practical details that I will revise and adapt for the next ‘Interchange Project’. However, some of my key learning as an educator has been about what makes an experience valuable for different students at different stages of their learning journey, which seems to be more subtle and complex than I expected.
It has become clear to me that engaging with difficult personal experiences they’ve had while at university allows some third-years to see these experiences at a distance, recognise how it’s helped them to grow as a person and use these as a learning opportunity that might support a first year student. ‘If a body of knowledge is a landscape of practice, then our personal experience of learning can be thought of as a journey through this landscape.’ Wenger-Trayner, et al (2014)
Nevertheless, as my data analysis has revealed, talking about this ‘journey’ is something that can be deeply private and potentially shameful for students, many of whom may feel embarrassed about not having ‘succeeded’ whether socially or otherwise at university. While prompts and questions can invite these sort of disclosures, they can’t be forced, and not all students are ready to reflect on their experiences in this way. It is clear to me now why supporting a sense of belonging can’t fully be achieved at a college-wide level, and must be done sensitively and through knowing students as individuals. Perhaps rather than developing a blueprint for a successful mentoring programme that could be replicated, this project might need to be rewritten year on year, for different students and different encounters.
‘A pedagogy of taking care … involves not only drawing upon established forms of knowledge, values and practice but also engaging with uncertainty and the not-known as it encounters the diversity of ways of learning and their respective potentials.’ (Atkinson, 2022)
Before I began, I was aware that ‘success’ in this context might be something quite discreet and hard to measure. Some of the most effective connections between first and third-year students have been made on a one-to-one basis, where I have played the “embarrassing relative” and introduced specific students, whether from the same home country or with similar interests. If this is done under the guise of asking one to help the other with something particular, there is often sufficient structure for a social connection to be made with limited awkwardness. Student P was a recipient of one of these introductions and spoke in the interview about being pleased to have made a connection with a fellow Italian after previously feeling quite isolated.
‘That’s great if it’s once. Yeah, it’s already meaningful.’
So perhaps although discreet, these interventions have a lasting value.
References
- Atkinson D., . (2022). Pedagogies of taking care. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Wenger E., Fenton-O’Creevy M., Hutchinson S., Kubiak C., Wenger-Trayner B. and ProQuest (Firm). (2014). Learning in landscapes of practice. London: Taylor and Francis Group.