Session Outline

This interactive workshop, organised and featuring contributions by members of the UKAT PGT SIG, will focus on the relationship between the imagined futures of postgraduate students and their participation in personal tutoring and advising.

Imagined futures can be short and longer term, ranging from immediate expectations and anticipations (Ulriksen, 2009; Mearman and Payne, 2023) of what postgraduate study will be like, and their imagined relationship with their personal tutor or adviser, to longer term career plans and goals.

Students' considerations of these futures will be somewhat different for postgraduate students (Tobell and O'Donnell, 2013) than for undergraduates because they usually have a deeper well of prior educational experience from which to draw, but also are in an accelerated process, typically being on a one-year rather than three-year programme. Also, postgraduate students are proportionately more likely to be international and may experience trauma in cultural adaptation (Raby, 2023) sometimes linked to language (Horwitz, 2001).

The topics under discussion will remain open and space will be provided for participants to raise others, but will include:

A. Postgraduate students' expectations about their course, their immediate futures and their career and life goals, and their formation

B. Specific student expectations and anticipations about personal tutoring and advising

C. The role of tutoring in supporting students in achieving their goals

D. Barriers to take-up of tutoring, including mismatched expectations about tutoring

The workshop will be in three stages:

Stage 1: session leaders will make very short presentations based on prior expectations, ongoing projects, and new research data from student respondents

Stage 2: session participants will be invited to contribute their own thoughts, views and experiences in light of the presentations

Stage 3: collectively the group will construct a thematic map of what has been presented and discussed, including capturing any recommendations for practice

The session will clearly be relevant to anyone tutoring postgraduate students but applicable to any tutor of any type at any level, because of the overarching importance of expectations formation and confirmation/disappointment in students' sense of belonging and other dimensions of well being.

Learning Outcomes

Bibliography