Session Outline

This presentation will outline work over the last six months at the University of Bristol exploring how students engage with skills development. To what extent do they see it as a curricular, co-curricular or extracurricular activity? Underpinning this is the hope to better understand how students engage with the support and opportunities provided by the University, for example, through personal tutoring, and if they don’t, why not?

A key element of the University’s vision is to ensure that students gain the future skills needed to thrive in a changing world (Barnett, 2004). And understanding the extent to which students see this as something that happens because of, in spite of, or outside of their programmes of study and wider university provision is more important now than ever, in the face of continuing questions about the value of a university education. Personal tutoring gives us the chance to strengthen the connections between students’ experiences and their development if we can better understand the barriers that prevent them from engaging with developmental opportunities and help them overcome these barriers.

This project was undertaken by students in collaboration with the Bristol Institute for Learning and Teaching (BILT) and the University’s Careers Service. To make sure the student voice was truly represented, two Student Fellows conducted five faculty-specific focus groups with UG and PGT students, followed by a short survey to gauge engagement with specific skills development.

In this presentation, the Student Fellows will look at some of the preliminary findings on what students had to say about how they see skills development, what actions they have taken (if any), what barriers they have faced, and how these may be overcome. We ran a thematic analysis of the transcripts from the focus groups which, together with the responses to the short survey, shine a light on the extent to which students see skills development as an extracurricular or curricular/co-curricular activity.

In the focus groups, students often talked about skills development as a process towards personal self-growth that highlighted the challenge of providing generalised institutional support to something that is personal or disciplinary-specific. And this personal level is often where students situated the most significant barriers - such as managing their time or lacking confidence. But also, rather than a disconnect coming from the perception of a lack of skills development opportunities, many spoke about being overwhelmed by choice and not knowing where to start. Perhaps, the barriers lie not within the skills development provision itself but in how we help our students to navigate it.

In their survey responses many students indicated that their personal tutor had helped them reflect on their development, but during the focus group discussions references to these interactions were minimal, suggesting that perhaps they don’t recognise the role personal tutors play in how they engage with skills development.

A significant difference also emerged between those students who were intrinsically motivated and those whose motivation was linked to more extrinsic factors such as employability outcomes.

We will also present some of the initial actions we are taking following the findings and recommendations of this project, such as a series of student co-creation activities. These will seek to promote and support both student and staff engagement with skills development and support how both groups are able to navigate this vital aspect of the student experience that is often more complicated than it seems.

Learning Outcomes

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