Session Outline

This workshop builds on a cross-disciplinary research project which colleagues across a range of disciplines have conducted since 2017, investigating student attitudes to learning at the start and end of their first year at university.

Through surveys and focus group interviews conducted across a range of academic departments, developed from earlier iterations of our research on students’ feelings at the start of their studies - we explore whether students’ feelings in Sept 2020 and Sept 2021 were significantly different in light of the pandemic. We ask, if so, in what ways? We then interrogate what that might tell us about their readiness to undertake academic work specifically and start university life more generally.

Within the workshop we would like to reflect on our expectations of these cohorts and how we have predominantly viewed them. We then compare our expectations with what students had to say. The workshop will address four of the five key themes - identity, community, EDI and transformation, and ask how these could best be supported through academic tutoring.

We will give a brief presentation on how we conducted the research and some of the findings. However, 'findings' are not the same as 'understanding what happened and why', and we would like to take the opportunity of the workshop to engage participants in sharing their understanding of our findings.