Emma Yhnell and Emmajane Milton, Cardiff University
The Association of National Teaching Fellows (ANTF) 2024 Symposium was held 23rd-24th April at Nottingham Trent University. This was our first ANTF national symposium, and we were delighted to be presenting an interactive workshop. Our session, in the sub theme of equity and ethics, was entitled “Do all of our learners get an equitable learner experience?”
We invited colleagues to consider this question, reflecting on their own institutions, practice and experiences. It was lovely to have Professor Julie Hulme chair the session and we had participants from many different universities across the UK which enabled rich, challenging and thought-provoking conversations throughout this interactive workshop.
The idea behind our session was driven by a mutual desire to ensure that in Higher Education we are genuinely working towards meeting the needs of our diverse student populations and to encourage conversations about how we, as academics, see this as a moral endeavour. Ultimately it is about doing the ‘right thing’, but how this is seen and viewed across the sector can and does differ, often substantially. We began the session by talking about how we feel our own practice as educators’ models to students what is valued and how it can influence whether they feel they ‘fit’– it can make or break a sense of belonging and community. Students notice how educators behave, and they consequently start to learn what is and is not acceptable and therefore valued from our responses. In our session there was mutual agreement that this means we all need to take care, be mindful and continually reflect on our approaches – this takes time and can be difficult to prioritise when the day job is busy.
We discussed what it means to meaningfully ‘see’ students and really acknowledge them and how sharing some of our own (sometimes more personal experiences) can be helpful in breaking down barriers and helping students to see us as people, reducing unhelpful power dynamics. We debated and discussed different perspectives on whether equitable teaching can also be high quality and the ways in which it is possible, although potentially more difficult, to meet individual student needs when faced with teaching large cohorts.
There was agreement from participants that building consensus about these ways of working across staff teams, programmes and departments was hugely important. And that to achieve real change, practices need to become embedded, which requires time, so that ways of working can become maintained and sustained over time. We also discussed how there needs to be a commitment from all of us as educators to check in with our students, to jointly review our practices and to hold ourselves to account – working in this way is an active choice.
In reflecting on our session, we were delighted to find and reassured to know that they are other like-minded people in our Higher Education Institutions who also care passionately about students and their experiences of learning. Whilst reassured, we also felt there is always more to do … so, we wonder in your everyday practice as an educator, how do you work to meet your students where they are?
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Image: Image by Andrew Tan from Pixabay
