The Importance of boundaries in personal tutoring and academic advising
UKAT recently delivered our first workshop on ‘Setting Boundaries in Personal Tutoring and Academic Advising’ using LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) as the medium to communicate and discuss some tricky issues for staff at Harper Adams University. The workshop explored colleagues’ individual boundaries around their roles as senior tutors, course tutors and professional service staff who provide advice and guidance to students.
The workshop picked up on common themes for colleagues about what constitutes a boundary and what this looks like. For example, responding to student emails out of office hours, we’ve all been there, working in the evenings to get ahead or catch up from a busy day/week, grazing over our inbox when a student email lands. The reaction might be to answer it immediately, you just happen to be online, and you can answer their message… job done? Right? Not always, the issue is that in doing so you set expectations with the student who in the future may expect a similar response. Additionally, it places extra pressure on colleagues who also receive similar emails from students (out of hours) and if they don’t respond, it sends another message to the student… because students talk… ‘oh my tutor replied to my email straight away, it was great, I know I can rely on them to answer my questions’. Or ‘my tutor takes ages to reply to my emails, it’s hard to get hold of them’.
At our 10th UKAT conference in April this year, Elizabeth Halstead and Liz Herbert (UCL) presented on the topic of boundaries and how difficult this can be for colleagues (and students) to navigate. Colleagues were encouraged to consider different types of boundaries and how they can impact on us personally and professionally. We were invited to consider the 6 types of boundaries (see here) and map these against our roles at university.
The very nature of the University experience is that HE is locked in a difficult battle between work and education, for students it is the gateway experience to transition into successful careers and full adulthood. The environments that we create in universities needs to acknowledge that students don’t always know the boundaries that they have to negotiate, so is it any wonder that they make mistakes or are misled due to inconsistencies by staff? There is a significant nod to the hidden curriculum that students are expected to understand alongside their academic journey, worth taking a look at work done by colleagues at the University of Leeds.
The workshop Setting Boundaries in Personal Tutoring and Academic Advising’ helps staff uncover those tacit pieces of knowledge, pinpoint specific boundaries which they personally feel are a redline between them and their students. Other examples discussed included if staff should accept friend requests on social media or LinkedIn requests? Should they share their personal mobile phone number? These are all things that are often tricky to decide what is right and what is not. The main outcome of the day was to help staff identify their own personal boundaries, but also open up discussion with colleagues about a socially constructed set of boundaries that could be communicated to students to help them navigate a more consistent experience while at university.
If colleagues are interested in having UKAT deliver a workshop to your colleagues to explore personal and group boundaries in academic advising, please get in touch, enquries@ukat.ac.uk