My initial concern about a reluctance to participate from third-year students turned out to be misplaced. When I first briefed the initiative to a third-year group, a dozen signed up immediately. In my briefing I had asked them to reflect on their past two years of study and think through what they’d learned along the way. By chance rather than design, this seemed to tap into a moment of reflection as they realised they were in the final stages of the course and began looking back on their own journey.
Copy of initial briefing presentation for Year 3 students
I was the First Year Leader when this cohort arrived at Camberwell two years previously, and so for many- I would have been the first person they spoke to on arrival. For a fortnight after briefing the initiative I was frequently stopped in the corridor and canteen by third-year students that had been at the Interchange Briefing and were eager to tell me about their own personal experiences on the course and how they had grown as people. I became conscious of how my role as researcher played a part in how the students engaged with the project.
‘Narrative inquiry foregrounds the interactions between researcher and research participants and fostering reciprocity in research relationships’. Akoto (2013), cited in Timmis et all (2024)
Rather than an impartial observer, in Braun and Clarke’s (2022) guide to Thematic Analysis they describe how within the qualitative paradigm, the subjectivity of the researcher is valued as a ‘situated interpreter of meaning’.
A second, pleasant surprise was the specific third-years who signed up. Rather than the ‘regulars’ I was expecting, who can be relied upon to turn up and engage in most optional activities, the list was made up almost entirely of students who had at some point struggled on the course. Whether this struggle was through failing or resubmitting units, problems with attendance, financial difficulty, changing course or taking time out or through lacking in confidence and struggling to integrate socially. For me, there seemed to be a clear correlation between the students who felt they hadn’t had an ‘ideal’ experience, and those wanting to be involved with potentially improving the experience of new students.
It became apparent that by reframing these negative experiences, third-years were able to see them as a useful piece of embodied knowledge, that could be applied and used in a constructive manner. Wenger-Trayner et al. (2014) talks about journeying through the landscape of practice, which is constructed from a ‘social body of knowledge’ bringing together knowledge, personal perspectives and lived experience. With this in mind, I quickly added a Q&A to the first Interchange session, with prompts to provide an opportunity for third-years to bring some of this experience into the conversation.
A copy of the Padlet responses from the Q&A in the first Interchange session. It was interesting to note which experiences third-year students chose to share on the Padlet, and which they only spoke about verbally. Note the lack of engagement with the question about ‘low points’, which was discussed in-depth in the studio.
Ajjawi, Gravett & O’Shea’s (2023) study on belonging found that students did not want to be passive consumers of an education but to actively contribute towards a bigger picture explaining ‘how personal feelings of belonging intersect with social structures that work to include or exclude – such as race … or economic means.’ At this point my research question evolved as I began to understand how the act of sharing their personal experiences- however challenging, could make the act of mentoring meaningful for the third-year students.
References
- Ajjawi, R., Gravett, K., & O’Shea, S. (2023). The politics of student belonging: identity and purpose. Teaching in Higher Education, 30(4), 791–804. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2023.2280261
- Braun V., Clarke V., . (2022). Thematic analysis: A Practical Guide. Los Angeles: SAGE.
- Sue Timmis, Emmanuel Mgqwashu, Sheila Trahar, Kibashini Naidoo, Lisa Lucas & Patricia Muhuro (2024) Students as co-researchers: participatory methods for decolonising research in teaching and learning in higher education, Teaching in Higher Education, 29:7, 1793-1812, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2024.2359738
- 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.