Episode 12: Talking to Students about Generative AI

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Photograph of our two speakers, Carol and Tom, of our producer Simon, and of our presenters Heather and Wendy.
Our guests, Prof Thomas Ormerod and Prof Carol Alexander, our producer Simon Overton, and our presenters Dr Heather Taylor and Prof Wendy Garnham.

The Learning Matters Podcast captures insights into, experiences of, and conversations around education at the University of Sussex. The podcast is hosted by Prof Wendy Garnham and Dr Heather Taylor. It is recorded monthly, and each month is centred around a particular theme. The theme of our twelfth episode is ‘talking to students about AI’ and we hear from Professor Thomas Ormerod and Professor Carol Alexander.

Recording

Listen to the recording of Episode 12 on Spotify

Transcript

Wendy Garnham & Heather Taylor:  

Welcome to the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex, where we capture insights, experiences, and conversations around education at our institution and beyond. Our theme for this episode is Talking to Students about Generative AI. And our guests are Professor Carol Alexander, Professor of Finance, and Professor Thomas Ormerod, Professor of Psychology. Our names are Wendy Garnham and Heather Taylor, and we are your presenters today. Welcome everyone. 

Heather Taylor:  

Carol, how are you currently talking to students about generative AI, and what kinds of support or guidance do you provide to help them use it responsibly? 

Carol Alexander:  

Well, I teach two modules this term, one graduate and one 3rd year undergraduate. And the 3rd year undergraduate, using generative AI is one of the learning outcomes. I teach them how to use ChatGPT or Claude. I prefer not to use Claude. It’s not great for finance. For finance ChatGPT is clearly the best. I teach them ChatGPT in workshops, at least the chap who’s doing the workshops does. We design the workshops so that, at the beginning, they understand the importance of context engineering. It’s setting your project instructions well, at least setting your basic personalisation, and then project instructions, keeping things tidy with projects, managing, so called memory. It’s not actually memory because every time you send a prompt, the entire previous conversation is attached to it. So realising that stuff early in the conversation can get lost and the importance of recapping that, telling it to forget certain things so that this context window, which has a certain size, it has a certain number of tokens – tokens here means bits of words and so forth. You might put in a very inefficient prompt, which is a few words long, and then it responds with 10 pages because it doesn’t really know what you want. And that is what you don’t want to do. You want to engineer each prompt you use to get an efficient output, not just efficient from the point of view of the students’ learning, but also from the point of view of energy consumption as well. We go through all that, and then in the context of the financial risk management module, they do their workshops. I mean, not always using ChatGPT, but there are specialist GPTs, there are XLAI, and various other things. I’ve built a GPT called a Socratic learning scaffold, which helps them to learn anything new. And then I just set the project, which is 70% of the assessment for this. You know, what used to take days now takes hours because I use my Socratic learning scaffold and it doesn’t have to be Socratic, but that’s just, you know, getting to understand a bit of philosophy. Anyway, so they must think out of the box whereas in the past, I would not dare to set a project exercise that they hadn’t already experienced something very similar of in workshops or lectures. But now I’m setting them something that they’ve not actually done before. It’s associated, but it’s a little bit more advanced than we’ve done because they can teach themselves to do that, and that’s the first step of this project. 

Wendy Garnham:  

Sounds as though it’s like fostering creativity. And the idea of sort of getting them to take what they’ve learned before, but to build on it and do new things with some of that learning.  

Carol Alexander:  

Well, I mean, the project starts off with a paragraph, are you interview ready? Because they’re third years. And the job market out there, of course, we can get on to talking about that later if you like, but, I mean, it’s awful for white collar jobs and particularly, you know, finance in the City. Graduate roles are being replaced with AI. One person can do the output of five now. But, if they are competent with playing this piano, not just having the piano, but making a very nice melody from the piano and knowing how to tune it for whatever they’re going to play, they stand a much better chance of getting. And this project itself, I hope, will be attached to their CV, and in some way, they can, they can apply for jobs. 

Heather Taylor:  

Yeah. Amazing. Do they do they like doing it? Have you had good feedback? 

Carol Alexander:  

Because I record all the lectures for my sins. Although, I’m going to upload them to update my YouTube channel because that’s very out of date. I did that in COVID. So it’s now, like, five years out of date. But I did that for the same module five years ago. And so now I do for every lecture, two-hour lecture, there’s six videos prerecorded. And I go in there after Tom on a Monday morning, we share the same lecture room. And I just stand there and say, okay. You know, I put up a Word Cloud on PollEv and say, what do you want me to talk about? And everything is totally interactive. And I may look at lecture notes, so I very often just scribble. And it’s like the old-fashioned way of writing on the blackboard is back, although I do it on the overhead projector. And I’m gauging the engagement this year, and I haven’t seen anything like this for years now, particularly with Gen Z. You know? But there’s eye to eye contact. Very few people are looking at the phones because it’s interactive, and they’re getting what they want. They’re asking the questions. 

Wendy Garnham:  

Music to my ears as an active learning fan.  

Heather Taylor (05:54): 

So, Tom, same question to you. How are you currently talking to students about generative AI, and what kinds of support or guidance do you provide to help them use it responsibly? 

Thomas Ormerod:  

So, we’re in a very different place today. A very different place indeed. I would say to many of my colleagues, and I apologise if I’m putting speaking out of place, it’s still a threat, not an opportunity. I see it as a huge opportunity, and I’m just trying to work with the students so that they feel that too. So, I teach the final year module as well, just before Carol comes on with hers. And I am in a position where I’m talking to our students about the positives of using generative AI. And I say to them, it would be irresponsible of us to let you leave university without skilling you to some extent in the use of what must be the most powerful intellectual tool since the invention of the computer.  

As a school, though, I think we are incredibly slow to pick up on this. We don’t teach them how to use generative AI. I teach them what not to do. I teach them that it’s really good for formatting. It’s really good for all those boring things like, you know, getting the right APA formats, which we seem obsessed about in in psychology. It’s really good for data cleaning, data processing, data handling generally. It’s really good for putting in an essay and saying tell me what you think about this. It’s really good for the things like ‘I’ve written something, can you bullet point it so I can see my own structure.’ It’s really good for having a conversation with, and that’s where we need to teach them how to have a conversation. And the one thing I say that you don’t want to do is ask it to generate your content for you, because we’re very much still essay based, text based, produce a reasoned argument about. I kind of am setting ground rules in my teaching for saying you really should use generative AI. These are the good things to do, and here’s something you just don’t do. What I don’t do is I say, because this is academic malpractice. I mean, it is if you look at the regulations, but frankly, we’re not going to be able to tell or at least prove that people have written generated material using generative AI. We can often tell, but we can’t prove it. But what I say to my students is two things. First, if you use generative AI to generate your essays, you’ll probably get a 2:2 because it will be alright, but it won’t be great. More importantly, when you are a forensic psychologist sitting in a prison on your first day under supervision, you aren’t allowed a computer in a prison. You must know the stuff. You must think about the stuff. That’s the moment you’ll wish you’d use generative AI in the right way. One of the things I’ve started to do is put in assessments that, encourage them to think intellectually about the material.  

I have this thing where I get them to write a monograph chapter, where they get four papers and they have to write a chapter that would go in a monograph, that, integrates across those four themes. And then the one thing I put into this, you see, I say you must have an illustrative figure. You must have some picture that shows the point you’re trying to make about those four papers. ChatGPT at its best is bad at that. It’s bad at doing that, and the students really struggle with it as well because it’s one of the first times they’ve been challenged to be truly creative intellectually, in an essay format. I think we’re finding ways where we can use generative AI positively, that free us from the traditional essay format. And I think that’s my takeaway message to myself is rethink the assessment to fit the new tools we have. 

Heather Taylor:  

Yeah. I love that. I love the idea of the assessment. The point you made about, don’t get them to write, you know, encouraging them, not to use it to generate their content. And I think it’s possible they could get a 2:2, you know, but it depends on the topic, I guess. I sometimes ask AI when I’m bored in the morning, and I’m the like, no-one else gets up when I get up, so it’s just me in the lonely world at 5am and I ask it questions about things I know a lot about, and it gives me some nonsense back, like some real nonsense that would go against anything I would teach my students. 

Thomas Ormerod:  

Yes. I have a lovely example of this. You may have come across this example before, but I don’t know if it’s still true. But it certainly was true a couple of months ago. If you type in to ChatGPT, draw me a beautiful room, a picture of beautiful room without an elephant in it, it draws you a picture of a room with an elephant in it. And it does that because it’s being clever. It knows the expression elephant in the room, so it thinks, you know, the elephant should be in the room because of it, etc. Why would you say do it without an elephant in it? If you say draw a room without a pig in it, there’s no pig in it. So that’s the way you can test that. Now I use this as a teaching aid with my students because I say to them, you can all see that that’s quite funny. Right? And it’s that it’s not doing what you asked. What if you didn’t know what an elephant was? When you generate content, you don’t know that content. So how do you know it’s right? How do you know it’s not put in material that’s incorrect? How do you know it hasn’t put an elephant in your essay? I don’t know how powerful that is as an illustration, but they all go ooh. 

Heather Taylor (11:32):  

You’re right. And I’ve asked it to do a reconfiguration floor plan in my house before where I moved the stairs so I could fit a bathroom in upstairs, and I told it all of this. I could probably get some tips from you on how to more efficiently talk to AI, to be fair. But it gave me a floor plan. It was 3D, which isn’t what I wanted. But, anyway, the stairs were there, the bathroom was there, but the bathroom was downstairs, and the stairs ended in the bath. Yeah. And I was like, I won’t try this. 

Thomas Ormerod:  

And did you do it?  

Heather Taylor: 

Exactly. It was great. Yeah. But, yeah, it was just like, it just decided how can I fit in what she’s asking me for into this tiny space, which is my house, and it did do it, but in a completely unliveable way because it doesn’t live in a house, does it? It doesn’t know. So yeah. 

Wendy Garnham: 

But it does it with papers as well because I’ve done it with the students where we show them, like, a paper. We ask it to summarise a paper, and it tells you completely the wrong information. It pulls together ideas from other papers and it created this story. 

Carol Alexander:  

Yes. But you can control that, this hallucination. You can set up a project where the domain that it looks at is only the lecture notes. And then you can, do your prompt more efficiently. You can use the code words step by step, for example. And, also, my personalisation, which are the base level instructions, are always ask a clarifying question at the beginning of a conversation. 

Wendy Garnham:  

Yeah. I think without that input though, if students are just, certainly in foundation year, if students think we’ll just go to ChatGPT they’re putting in the essay question or, you know, the blog post titles, whatever, and seeing what comes up. And they do tend to just think that’s a useful summary or, you know, that’s really sort of saved me ploughing through. We use that as a sort of starting point to say don’t be tempted just to go away and just, like, put this question into ChatGPT because you cannot guarantee that what comes out is going to be useful, helpful, whether it’s going to be accurate. So that’s sort of how we start that whole story. But then, of course, we do our active essay writing, which we developed with Tom, where we sort of get them to start with their own ideas first. So just, you know, what occurs to you when you see this as a title? You know, what are the ideas you’ve got? What questions do you have about it? You know, so try and have confidence in your own ideas first before you turn to anything else. 

Carol Alexander:  

And I was just thinking, you know, we’re in a transition period. Soon, the students coming into university will be better than we are at prompt engineering. You know, it’s as I said, it’s like a piano or like a car. Just because you got one doesn’t mean, say, you’re not going to drive it and have a crash. But, this young generation are going to be growing up with it, and they’re going to be absolute masters at playing it like they are at video games. So only over the next few years have we got to educate at university level. By that time, we just gotta cope with the few students that actually want to come to university at that point being better at using ChatGPT than us. What value have we got to offer? Because you can teach yourself so quickly with ChatGPT or any LLM. Particularly Chat GPT is so much better than the others. 

Wendy Garnham (15:06):  

That brings us nicely to our next question. I’m going to ask this to you, Tom, first. In your discipline, where do you see generative AI offering the greatest value and what are the key risks or limitations? 

Thomas Ormerod:  

I think it could, if done correctly, be quite democratising because now there’s been in the last 10 to 15 years a huge change in the skills requirement for the behavioural sciences. In my day you just went to the pub recruited a few people to do little puzzles, you wrote down what they said and then you published it. It was easy. These days with the Open Science Movement which has basically responded to the fact that so much of psychological research just doesn’t replicate because it was done by people like me. We have a much stricter approach to methodology and so there’s a whole, there’s reams of stuff around pre-registration, there’s a use of the R environment for constructing your analyses. There’s a whole new range of statistical techniques. There’s a whole new range of qualitative techniques. I mean wow if you open up the mind of thematic analysis you find there’s a new thematic analysis method for every researcher in the world as far as I can tell.  

And it’s actually meaning that a small subset of researchers are gaining access to journals, gaining access to grants because we can’t reskill ourselves quick enough. So one of the promises I think of generative AI is it can take an awful lot of the legwork out of that and allow us to do the interesting hard thinking that we want to do properly supported by tools that say, hey, you don’t actually have to learn all these funny little commands in R that you always get wrong because you don’t put a full stop or a capital in the right place. We’ll do that. You think about great things about how the mind works. That’s my fantasy for what we should be doing in psychology as a discipline, is saying, let’s use generative AI to help us think deeper thoughts. And let’s use generative AI to help us tackle questions like how do you do belief revision? Now we’re so obsessed in the methodology of our experiments. We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how people change their minds. And that’s the level we ought to be working at as scientists. But instead, we’re working at the level of how can I get my code to work? 

Carol Alexander:  

Yeah. Well, coding is a big, plus for, in finance, in the you know, if we’re training students to go and work in the industry, the job of a developer, you know, writing Python code and things like that is more or less, non-existent now because LLMs write perfect Python code. You just need to know how to ask the right questions to get the right code out. But I think the advantages in finance is, you have to distinguish between the advantages for educational purposes, and the advantages for research. And on the side of advantages for research, you know, it can mathematical proofs, so basically what we do is we get mathematical models of financial markets or financial institutions, and we get data, and then we apply the mathematical model to the data, and then we see whether our hypotheses about where things should happen are true, with some statistical analysis on the data that is and the models that we do the statistical tests on are derived from our basic formulation. And, sometimes it’s quite difficult to get from that basic formulation to a form of the model that you can actually test. But now, I mean, it’ll even write the basic formulation for me. So, you know, deriving an economic model of behaviour in financial markets is easy. Anyway, so that’s on the research side. But on the student side, it’s still the same because, of course, we’re educating them to do what we do in the profession, what we do in research, what we do in the profession, which is build mathematical models with some data.  

So, you know, as I said, there were these specialist GPTs, generative pretrained transformers, a particular type of LLM. There’s a whole library of these in, the OpenAI product. There are also libraries of similar sort of things in Claude or Perplexity and things like that, but they’re much, much more advanced. They these things have been produced for years, and there’s now, I don’t know, 20, 120, 200,000 of them. As I said, I made my own, so if I can do it, I’m sure loads of other people are. The most popular one is generating your own horoscope. And the second one is semantic scholar. It’s sort of helping you write essays and things like that. But there’s a lot of Excel AI, for example. You upload some data. You just – I don’t even write now because the dictation is so good on ChatGPT. All my ums and ahs, and ‘hang on. I got that wrong’. And I just have a stream of consciousness, which then, even before it’s translated and I press send into the prompt, all the ums and ahs and the corrections I made magically disappear from the translation. It’s extraordinary. I use that for writing emails. I just copy and paste it and put it in a prompt. Anyway, so I just have a bit of a mind dump and then put it into one of these Excel AIs. And at first, they use Python, then they just put it in an Excel spreadsheet. But then now, they click to view the formula in Excel. 

Thomas Ormerod (20:49):  

Yes. I did a similar thing just yesterday morning. I was prompted by Claude, it said you’re doing this inefficiently why don’t I build you an app? And it built me an app to do it. I had to process 40 different spreadsheets. It just said I could do this one by one for you as you seem to be thinking, but why don’t I build you an app? And then it took the task down from a day to half an hour. 

Carol Alexander:  

The thing about Claude is it just creates these artifacts all over the place, and you can’t relabel your chats, and you can’t delete them. And what you have to do is put them all in a project and delete the whole project if you want to tidy up some of those chats. But you can’t relabel them. When you’re looking back, you’ve got no proper index to know what you’ve done in the past. But then, for me, it was just hundreds of artifacts, most of which were useless, were being produced. This is one example of an artifact that was useful. But had you gone direct to the artifact build rather than let it do it in a chat, then you could have had a little bit more control over that article. You could have named it. 

Thomas Ormerod:  

I shall do that in future.  

Wendy Garnham:  

So that seems to relate more to sort of the value. How about the risks or the limitations? I’ll ask Carol first. What do you see as being the risks or limitations? 

Carol Alexander:  

Well, I mean, the singularity. You know? Artificial general intelligence, where the point where they get more intelligence than us in, whatever use, more powerful than us. I mean, I was just watching this podcast by what’s his name? I’ll just find his name – the diary of a CEO? He’s just done one with Roman Yampolskiy, I think. And he wrote lots of books. He’s completely mad as a hatter, I have to say. He believes, 100% that we are living in a simulation run by superior agents, you know. He sort of takes this idea of simulations to the extreme. And I mean, it’s true that there are some wonderful simulations. Apparently, Google 3, Google Earth 3, you can put yourself in the Grand Canyon and steer yourself or up the Amazon River. Steer your own route. And you can just imagine, when that becomes a 2-player game, you can be steering yourself up your Amazon river, and then your friend decides to put a Zulu tribe there or whatever. Not a Zulu, but you know what I mean. So you can sort of if you take that to the extreme, then yeah this simulation theory has some credibility. But no. I mean, I think what’s going to be happening is just as we become cyborgs more and more, right, I’m attached to my phone, and I do worry I lose it. I would much rather have it embedded in my arm, thank you very much. And other stuff like ChatGPT. I wouldn’t mind having that, as a sort of earpiece. You know, the Google glasses as well. We’re getting more and more like cyborgs. And then on the bioengineering side, you can imagine that, you know, it’s progress so rapid that human DNA or some brain cells could be put into a humanized robot. They’re getting quite agile now, although the Tesla one’s completely empty. But in Japan, you know, they’re getting some good robots. And so, you know, what we’re looking at is very high unemployment apart from plumbers, but maybe these robots could even be plumbers. But, you know, we’ve got a huge demand for construction, particularly if we’re going to go to war, usual thing that’s you know the economy rebounds because of building things for war.  

And we’ve been struggling since 2008 because of the bankers, and the bankers aren’t going away, although that’s another story. Anyway so, yeah, there’s quite a lot of risk. I wouldn’t take it to that extreme, but I do see large unemployment for a while as jobs change. So white collar jobs are going to be few and far between. Certain jobs like hairdressers. You know, plumbers cost so much and builders in Brighton are awful. You know, I mean, we should start offering proper apprentice degrees in some universities, not all our degrees, but some universities like Sussex, I think, would be ideal for that, and particularly since Brighton University used to be one of these wonderful technical colleges until Thatcher shut them all down and called them universities. We need to go back to that world where we are properly training, construction people, and then it wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg because there’d be a greater supply. 

Thomas Ormerod (25:58):  

I think Carol’s right to point to potentially dystopian future. If you think about it from an educational context, I think the big takeaway message there is fear. I think that because we’re learning the implications of the new technology, there’s likely to be levels of fear, amongst faculty and students around what what’s going to happen. What will my degree mean? How am I going to assess people anymore if I use essays that they can write on the computers? And I think that will be a transitionary phase, we hope. But I think we have to recognise that because I think that the anxiety that it’ll raise will be quite considerable.  

And I think that’s why this is a useful session, I think, because I think that the takeaway message from both Carol and I would be that there is more to be discovered that is useful than we should be worrying about. Yes, we should worry, but we should worry positively. Okay. If we’re going to change the world of work, what are we going to change it to? Carol’s example is let’s look at the construction trade, for example. When I was doing AI research back in the 1970s, I was only about 5 at the time. That’s not true. The big worry was that robots would take over all the blue-collar jobs that, you know, because we could have a vacuum cleaner that could sweep a house, that you could have a vacuum cleaner that could sweep the roads. You could do all the blue-collar jobs, exactly the opposite has happened. And it’s the white-collar jobs that are under threat. We must reconceive the world of work. We must think, what do we get people to do? In the same way that when the typing pool disappeared with the word processor, we had to reconceive. Well, what does what does a PA do now? Apart from, you know, buy the chairman’s birthday present for them. That we had to rethink what those roles are about. And I think that if universities have a place, it’s to do that job. We need to rethink the future. And as part of our curriculum, we need to be sending our students away realising that that’s their job is to rethink the futures of the trades they would be going into, not just come up with a bunch of skills that allow them to do what was good in 1973. 

Wendy Garnham:  

I think that also changes that idea of anxiety about ChatGPT and AI and where it’s heading, because I think you have to have a level of anxiety in order to be able to think about how it’s changing and how you adapt and so on. I think for me the danger is if we don’t have that anxiety and we just ignore it or park it and we think that we can just carry on as we’ve always done because that’s just how we do things, I think you know, sometimes having that level of anxiety means actually we are thinking ahead and we are planning ahead. I think that can be seen. 

Carol Alexander:  

It’s the right level though. You don’t want to do much. 

Wendy Garnham:  

But you need some. Otherwise, you’re just stuck in a rut of doing things the way you’ve always done, where the advances are happening alongside and the two never connect. And I think, you know, that for me is sort of a danger that you have, you know, this sort of disconnect between – I know it’s happening but I’m not going to change anything I’m doing – whereas I think that level of anxiety sometimes can be a push towards thinking ahead. 

Heather Taylor: 

I was thinking, well, about what both of you were saying, but something you said earlier, Tom, about researchers. If we didn’t have to spend ages figuring out our code or whatever it happened to be, so the researchers could do the more interesting thinking. And I think when I’ve spoken to people before about ChatGPT, I’ve said we should be teaching students to do the things that it can’t do. But really, I think of that as sort of philosophical questions that have got nuance. I don’t really think ChatGPT thinks. I think it tells me stuff. I don’t really view it as thinking in the way a human thinks. 

Thomas Ormerod:  

Think that what Carol does is a good example of what we should be doing, which is not expecting ChatGPT to think, but letting ChatGPT help us to think. I think when I’ve used it successfully, most successfully, I’ve had a dialogue when we always seem to get kind of ratty with each other sometimes. And we can’t help but anthropomorphise when you use it. If you get into that dialogue state, and where you’re asking it to critique you, then you can get some really positive thoughts coming out of it, I think. 

Carol Alexander (30:52):  

I’m very interested in my emotional reactions to it because I iterate all the time. You know, I start off with a prompt and it gives something, and then I look at it, and then I read what I want to change, or what I don’t like, and I dictate and press play, and then it goes on. And then if it doesn’t succeed after about three iterations to progress, I get cross with it. And I say you’re rubbish. I don’t like 5. Give me 4.1. You know? Thank goodness I’ve still got access to 4.1. And so I do choose a model. But then there are other times, and I have to say that 5, ChatGPT 5 does whir too much. You know, it’s slow. It thinks too much, even the instant and the thinking mini. But, anyway, I do like 4.0. I like 4.1. It’s more of a workhorse, and I praise it. I say, ‘oh, gosh. I love you, 4.0. You’re so good. Do you know ChatGPT 5 is awful? I wish they were all like you.’ 

Do you know that over 60% of the prompts to LLMs worldwide are on the human relationship side, i.e. asking for companionship, just basic chat, or therapy? Over 60%. I got that figure a few weeks ago from one of the, you know, one of my Google feeds, which, of course, only feeds me what I want. 

Heather Taylor:  

That’s quite a concern. But also because sometimes I’ll ask it, so I know loads about obsessive compulsive disorder, and that’s what I’ll quiz ChatGPT on, to see how good it’s getting and if it’s learning from me. You know? And it used to be rubbish. It’s a bit better now. But my concern with people using it as therapy is that there are specific models that are used to treat specific disorders, even specific sub-symptoms within disorders or themes within disorders. And using a different therapy for a slightly different disorder or whatever it might happen to be could cause a lot of problems. And it concerns me when people use ChatGPT for therapeutic reasons because there’s advice even with self help books to, if you need extra support make sure you reach out for it. You stop doing it. Uncomfortable feelings can come up. ChatGPT could just be talking pure nonsense to someone that could be, you know, making their problems worse. 

Carol Alexander:  

There was a big law case in OpenAI. A young American chap killed himself. And then around the time of the GPT 5 update, they put a patch on so that now it’s so much more conservative. So, you know, it’s a bit like HR – HR finds something goes wrong, and then they issue all these rules that you’ve got, you know, adhered to in your behaviour in the company. But then there’s going to be some other things that somebody does, outside those rules. So they haven’t changed the basic way that ChatGPT operates. But the good thing about Claude and the reason I got a subscription for a month, which I’d used for about a week, and that’s because Claude is different. It’s not a GPT. It’s an LLM that’s built on a code of ethics, sort of governance principles. It’s almost like a constitution that ‘thou shalt not do anything that would help people build chemical weapons’, for example, were a recent change to its constitution. I thought it was a better way of building an LLM and less prone to having to have these bits of string and elastoplasts to keep it functioning. But then there were all this other stuff that I then cancelled. 

Thomas Ormerod:  

I’m just terrified about the idea of generative AI becoming like HR. It’s not the way I want to see it going.  

Simon Overton (34:53): 

I’ve got a slightly more positive take on AI and it relates, if I may, to the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, which was, I think, an essay by Benjamin? Walter Benjamin. Anyway, the point of that was everybody was worrying that with mechanical reproduction, that works of art like Van Gogh’s Sunflowers would become devalued because everybody could get a copy of it and stick it on their, you know, bedroom wall. But the opposite happened. It didn’t decrease the value of the Sunflowers. It increased it. And I feel that a similar thing is happening. And I would say that a slightly more up to date example would be, the production of music and how these days people really value, for example, the experience of having their music on vinyl. And when you look at, I do a lot of YouTube, but when you look at that and you have music producers and all sorts of other content creators on YouTube, they’re very keen to state and to say that what they do does not use AI. I wonder, and I hope that maybe it’s, rather than devaluing the things that we most like about being human or the things that we value, including perhaps a more traditional form of university education, I wonder whether it would increase the value of it and people would appreciate it more. And then that perhaps is the direction that universities need to go in, to think people could do a Matrix and download the content into their head, like Keanu Reeves. But what can we actually do? What can we provide that is so much more human and so much nicer than that? And I think and I hope that is the direction. I wonder if you two have any thoughts about that. 

Thomas Ormerod:  

I’ll start. I think that is an optimistic view, and I think there’s some truth in it. I think the problem that you face is the volume issue. So, it’s a bit like the finest jewellery is very, very, very expensive, very exclusive, and you know it’s the finest because of the hundreds of hours that have gone into it. You go to Ratners and you’re getting a very different product. One of the implications of what you’re saying is that a lot of the volume work, the soundtracks to adverts, that kind of thing, is going to be done by AI because why wouldn’t you? Because it doesn’t matter whether what the ownership of the creative act is there. Whereas your Taylor Swift music is still going to be written by humans because Taylor Swift is a quality product, can charge premium fees. It’s almost in a sense the opposite of the democratising of it. That you then end up with a situation where an elite can afford human generated materials, but the rest of us basically gotta go to Ratners. 

Carol Alexander:  

Yeah. I mean, imagine people might prefer to have human accountants they have a relationship with or human personal trainers or human therapists, but, what LLMs are beginning to offer is that. For people that could not afford that sort of thing, at least a basic level of accounting or people in prison that don’t get any therapy at all, at least, you know they may get some help, or people on the streets.  

Thomas Ormerod: 

On the positive side to come back to this though, there are interesting and curious opportunities. In fact I just bought the Internet address for ain’t.com – AI, no thanks. Because I was talking to people who were working in recruitment and they were saying one of the problems they’re getting is that companies want an AI-free product to differentiate themselves from the fact that so much CV processing, etc, is done by AI systems, which we know introduce huge biases, ethnic, racial, gender biases, because they’re taking all their content from the world outside and the world is biased, they’re reflecting those biases in what they do. Being able to signal that you are an AI-free product is a bit like sort of being able to say, you know, gluten free or ultra-processed free or whatever. I think there will be a market, but it’s a niche market. And I think that what we have to face, is the volume issue that AI does it better at volume. 

Carol Alexander:  

And recruiters are in a terrible situation now because all CVs are perfect. They’re all written by ChatGPT, and they all look the same. Some of them even use secret words, and they, even though they didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge, they put in sort of white type Oxford In the footer and then they get through the algorithms that way. 

Heather Taylor (39:56):  

I think, based on what Simon was saying, I do get your point, You know, you could have a smaller quantity and a higher value product, and only a few people could afford it. But I feel like going back to what you said earlier, Carol, about how you will upload these videos and then you go into your lecture and go, what do you want me to talk about? And then they get to decide, and you said that improves engagement and so on. And I can see that it would. Okay? And that’s also very confident and brave of you to do it that way, and it’s great. To just be able to go in and go I’ll talk about whatever you like. I’d love to be able to do that, but I just waffle like I’m doing now. But I think maybe that’s the answer. I think maybe Simon’s point is almost that, we do need to know how to use AI, and I mean, like, we. I know you two know. Right? I don’t really know. I just argue with it a bit. 

Carol Alexander:  

You should watch my YouTube channel. It’s Professor Carol Alexander, and the playlist, because there’s some other ones there, is called a No Coders Guide to Surviving Generative AI. 

Heather Taylor:  

Okay. I am going to look. I think we need to know it so that we can know what it can do, so that we know what to offer students in terms of learning how to do this themselves. But also once they know how to do it better than us, like you’re saying they will, we need to know what are the things that are going to be valuable or they’re thinking that’s valuable for them that AI can support, but it can’t replace. And I think it’s almost like you could have, at volume, it’s trickier, but at volume, more handmade, more bespoke degrees so that if we didn’t have to teach like, Jennifer Mankin will kill me for this, but she’s in our department, but if we didn’t have to teach R, okay, if we didn’t have to have whole modules fill up with teaching them how to code, and if we didn’t have to teach – if I didn’t have to teach how they’re going to structure their research report, right, and I could just focus on their thoughts, their nuanced thoughts, their individual thoughts about things that they’re writing about in there, or I could get them to come up with a new research idea or whatever it happened to be. If we could move away from these things because AI took care of it for us, I feel like it would be a more engaging degree for them that could still be taught en masse. Okay? You know, you’d have to have people that are quite specialist in certain areas to be able to do that, like you would be with finance, you know, to be able to walk in and go ‘what do you want me to say?’ 

Carol Alexander (42:39):  

How are you going to fill up an entire degree, and do you want to? If the jobs are not there, we’re not going to get students applying 

Heather Taylor: 

I didn’t think about it from that point. If the jobs aren’t available, the students aren’t going to come to uni for that reason.  

Carol Alexander: 

But if we if we append an apprenticeship where, it may be an electrician or whatever, you know, a plumber, as I said before. They can get jobs in that, but they want still to come to university as a transition between home and the real world, where they expand their mind. They expand their understanding.  

When I was Sussex as an undergraduate, I was a science student. I did maths with experimental psychology, and we all had to take an optional art subject. I took witchcraft. But the point is that we you know, so some students that are in engineering, for example, and they may be, you know, civil engineering, they may still have jobs there, but a lot of their degree would be taken up by them just expanding their mind and deciding, okay, I want to take a module in blockchains and crypto assets, or something like that.  

Thomas Ormerod: 

That’s interesting that the white paper that came out the day before yesterday, the government is moving us towards this kind of cafeteria style of learning, which has strengths and weaknesses. It or at least it has threats. It has huge threats to the model we have now, but it also has opportunities for people being able to equip themselves with the skills that will get them jobs. 

I think even at a finer grain than that, one of the challenges for us in academia is to work out what skills we want people to have. In psychology, the principal skill that we’ve thought people should be able to have is to take large amounts of information, crystallise it, pull out a point, critique it, and then design something on the basis of that. Write stuff, to put it simply. Nowadays you could argue the skill we should be sending our students away with at least one of the skills is editing. That, yes, you’re going to get the stuff out from ChatGPT. Your job is to edit that, to do the job you want it to do because it won’t be perfect. It won’t be accurate. It won’t be complete. We should have a course on editing.  

Wendy Garnham:  

I’m just thinking. I went to a conference in the summer where they were talking about how they saw the future of generative AI and one of their arguments was that eventually it will collapse in on itself because you’ll be entering information into it to feed that algorithm that it’s already given you, so it just it becomes less of a useful tool. But I’m just interested to hear your views, both of you, on that. 

Thomas Ormerod:  

There is a fix for that, which is that you would have ChatGPT 6, that is self-reflective. I already know that. I’ve seen how this gets used. In a sense, putting confidence levels on its information, and using those as part of its updating, not just updating on the basis that here’s another mention. I think that is a genuine problem with our current understanding of the technologies. But once it becomes a problem, I think it could be fixed. Don’t you? 

Wendy Garnham:  

Looking five to ten years ahead, what psychological or behavioural changes might we expect from the widespread use of generative AI in everyday life? Tom. 

Thomas Ormerod:  

Well, optimistically, we will see people feeling more empowered because they know that they have a resource that can solve a lot of their everyday problems and that they can do bigger things, better things, that the technologies will have evolved in a way that makes them much more interactive in ways that the technology can start helping you to construct your ideas, construct your arguments, deal with your problems. That’s the optimistic end. The less optimistic side will be behaviourally that we begin to shut down because we lose confidence that we have anything to offer. And we do less because other things can do more than we think we can do.  

I’ve just finished a project funded by the Educational Enhancement initiative in the University which wasn’t looking at generative AI, it was looking at plagiarism and what it is that encourages people to plagiarise. And we did an intervention where we gave people essays to mark, half of which had been plagiarised, half of which hadn’t. And we found quite quickly that people gave the plagiarised ones better marks because they looked better. The text was better. And then we showed them what we would mark them as, and how the plagiarised ones did really badly, and there was an immediate effect of, but we measured the Turnitin scores, and they went from like an average of 15% across the cohort to 2%. And I think that there is this issue that people will lose confidence in their own ability to generate good material. And as academics, we must counter that. And we say, do you know what? They put an elephant in the room when you don’t want one. You’re writing, even if it’s colloquial, even if it’s full of spelling mistakes or a few naughty words, we like that better. We prefer you to do that and think for yourself and show that you thought for yourself than you get your grammar right, like what not what I’m doing now. 

Carol Alexander: 

I mean, I just think that it’s going to act as a sort of magnifier of inequality. There’ll be those that don’t even use it at all, and there’ll be those that just give up because they use it but they don’t feel that they can add anything by using it. And then the few, the elite who managed to increase their productivity so that what used to be done in a day is now done in an hour, are the ones that are going to thrive in every way. So, yeah, inequality is just getting worse. 

Heather Taylor: 

And if I watch your YouTube video, I can become one of those elite. 

Carol Alexander:  

That’s the idea. 

Thomas Ormerod: 

The challenge there that I’ll set you, once you’ve watched that and given that you’re educators, is if you’ve been in prison for fifteen years, you don’t really even know what Microsoft Office is. You don’t know what email is. You don’t know what the Internet is. How will we use generative AI to help people rehabilitate themselves into society when they’ve got that huge gulf in their knowledge? I say this because I’m on the parole board and I see these people coming up once a week when I’m in a parole panel. And they’re fascinated by our use of computers. We say to them, we’ll be looking at two screens. And one of them says to me, what’s a screen? What’s a keyboard? You know, so these people have been in prison for, like, years and they’ve gone in from the age of sixteen. And they’re, like, forty-six, thirty years in prison, and they don’t know anything about this. It’d be really interesting as a kind of difficult problem to solve. How can you use generative AI to get somebody back into the community After being out of it for so long? Don’t know the answer, throw it out there. 

Heather Taylor: 

It’s a great question.  

Wendy Garnham: 

Yeah. How do you start with that one?  

Heather Taylor: 

I would like to thank our guests, Carol and Tom. 

Carol Alexander: 

Thank you very much. 

Heather Taylor: 

And thanks for listening. Goodbye.  

This has been the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex created by Sarah Watson, Wendy Garnham, and Heather Taylor, and produced by Simon Overton. For more episodes as well as articles, blogs, case studies, and infographics, please visit: Podcast | Learning Matters 

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Episode 9: Inclusive Online Distance Learning

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The Learning Matters Podcast captures insights into, experiences of, and conversations around education at the University of Sussex. The podcast is hosted by Prof Wendy Garnham and Dr Heather Taylor. It is recorded monthly, and each month is centred around a particular theme. The theme of our ninth episode is ‘inclusive online distance learning’ and we hear from Sarah Ison and Brena Collyer De Aguiar.

Recording

Listen to the recording of Episode 9 on Spotify

Transcript

Wendy Garnham: Welcome to the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex, where we capture insights, experiences, and conversations around education at our institution and beyond. Our theme for this episode is supporting Online Distance Learning, and our guests are Sarah Ison, Librarian for Online Distance Learning at the University of Sussex, and Brena Collyer De Aguiar, Senior Learning Technologist for Online Distance Learning. Our names are Wendy Garnham and Heather Taylor, and we are your presenters today. Welcome, everyone.

Sarah Ison: Hello.

Brena Collyer De Aguiar: Hello. Hi.

Wendy Garnham: Today, we’ll be discussing how Brena and Sarah support online distance learners, the challenges and opportunities of teaching in a global online environment, and what lessons we can take from Online Distance Learning (ODL) into wider teaching practice at Sussex and across the sector. 

Heather Taylor: So, Brena, to start us off, could you tell us a bit about Online Distance Learning at Sussex and your individual role within the Online Distance Learning team? 

Brena Collyer De Aguiar: Yeah. So we have a number of master’s online courses, and also the PG cert. So they are 100% online courses. My role is I’m an Online Distance Learning Senior Learning Technologist. And I’m mainly responsible for liaising with academics around course development. So when they develop the courses and the modules, supporting them with academic, with assessment and pedagogic advice and design as well, you know, on trying to promote innovative learning experiences. I’m responsible for designing the academic training, so the essential training they have to attend when they are involved in ODL. And I also do a lot of reviews in terms of accessibility and make sure our courses are accessible.

Heather Taylor: So, Sarah, same question to you then. Can you tell us a bit about your role in the Online Distance Learning team at Sussex? 

Sarah Ison: Sure. So I’m the Online Distance Learning Librarian, and I’m dedicated to supporting students with their information literacy, their research skills, referencing, and helping them to avoid academic misconduct, hopefully. And I offer one-to-one sessions with students that want a little bit more support tailored to whatever they’re working on. And I provide recorded sessions and live sessions throughout their module so they have a chance to drop into like a session just to ask questions or come to my kind of launch session, which gives an overview of the way in which I can help support them. And so I could also support academic staff if they’re developing new modules, help them get their reading list together, and have some colleagues based in the library who actually get the reading lists embedded in Canvas and make sure that they’re working. And I also sometimes run bespoke sessions within a module on the request of the academic just to tailor something specific in specifically or at a certain point in the module to help really encourage the students to think about something in particular that relates to my remit. So, you know, library skills, information seeking, finding scholarly material, that sort of thing.

Wendy Garnham (03:18): You work with a diverse global cohort of students, many of whom are international or mature learners, sort of balancing work and life commitments and coming from a range of cultural backgrounds. How do your roles help foster a sense of community and belonging among students who are studying remotely, often across different time zones or cultures and age groups? 

Sarah Ison: So I teach kind of once a module. I offer a session to all new students, whatever subject they’re studying. I try to schedule it in the middle of the day to sort of meet whatever time zone they’re in. Obviously, that is quite challenging, and it’s an opportunity for students to come across each other, just in terms of at the start of a session, they’re quite informal. And I encourage them to put in the chat where they’re from, what’s the weather like, how are they feeling? Put an emoji and kind of reflect how you’re feeling at that moment in time. Just a couple of minutes at the start to just kind of do a little icebreaker, and just try and make it a friendly space, really, where people can ask questions throughout. They can either raise their hand formally in Zoom or they can just unmute and throw out a question or put it in the chat. And, yeah, I just try and make myself kind of really approachable so students feel comfortable to ask questions as we go along or follow up with a one-to-one if they need. And, yeah, it’s a challenge because of all the different time zones, and it’s amazing the range and variety of people that study on ODL. You’ve got people working full time, part time with caring responsibilities. They’re studying their second or third language. I’m in awe of what they are juggling to commit to completing their degree or their postgraduate studies at Sussex. It’s incredible. 

The Canvas site that I look after is called the Study Online Student Support Site or the SOS for short. That’s a space where students can utilize the discussion board area and come together across courses. So in their modules, they’re just meeting other people on their module. But on the SOS, they can throw out a question, get a discussion going, and connect with their peers who are studying on different topics, which is really good. And I’m always looking for ways to kind of build on that sense of community and just give students the opportunity to kind of meet each other but within my remit of supporting them. So, one thing I do is provide top tips every Tuesday. We have Top Tip Tuesday and Titbits Thursday because we needed another word beginning with ‘T’ for Thursday, where I try and drop in timely relevant tips depending on the week of the module that just helps them, whether it’s focusing on how to get your head around a long document, a big scholarly article, how to condense that down, note taking tips, other top tips that just help them as busy learners who are juggling a lot. I’d like to give them time saving tips and things and just help them get things done efficiently. So a lot of my focus is if you watch this video, it’s only 20 minutes, but it will save you lots of time in the long run. So, yeah, really trying to support through time saving techniques and making it relevant at the right point in the module as well.

Wendy Garnham: Just on that note, you mentioned the discussion board. Do you get quite a lot of buy-in to the discussion board? 

Sarah Ison: Not masses. So that is something that I think can always be encouraged. And if the usage dips a bit, then I can promote it a bit more. So that’s a good reminder that I can keep on promoting that because it just gives them a chance to share things. But the students do set up their own WhatsApp groups. So they do kind of get their own discussions going off official university platforms. So, you know, we don’t always know what’s going on there. But, yeah, I think Canvas is the main place where we can encourage community and coming together in different ways.

Brena Collyer De Aguiar (07:05): So I work much more with the academics, and I would say that my role, so my support goes into two phases. So one is the design phase, where, you know, I will support academics on thinking about making assessments more authentic. Trying to bring, you know, and make it very clear their space for the students to bring their own experience, but also what’s related to the place they live. We have large cohort courses. We have an MSc that is Sustainable Development, so it’s a very big number of students. And how do you also connect those experiences? The other way I try to bring this is trying to promote this conversational tone in the content itself. Like, trying to bring the teaching presence even, you know, when they’re doing their synchronous learning. And then it moves into support the academics during the teaching phase. So I lead, I’ve designed the training, the essential training they have to go. So it’s how, how do you set expectations for academics on how do you make the module live, how do you communicate, how do you set your expectations. So all the live sessions in the ODL modules should be recorded, and that’s to promote a second moment for engagement for those that due to their time zones or work commitments can’t join the live, etc. But also putting some tools in practice. So we do use, you know, we have the VLE – Canvas. We use, we organize the cohort according to time zones just to kind of be easy for academics to deliver live sessions that are according to their time zones. We also promote discussion boards that are set by groups just so they can, you know, communicate between themselves. And of course, some tips on design, you know, like, like Sarah uses as well. Having the discussion boards for introduction that allow them, display a place for connecting through their identity. So discussion boards that are fun or ask them to post pictures of their bookcase and try to guess, you know, who else is reading the same or who could be that person. So that’s kind of how I try to promote those spaces for the students through the design and support academics.

Heather Taylor (09:24): So, Sarah, online engagement can be a challenge, especially as many Online Distance Learning students and mature learners are balancing work and study. What approaches, whether through course design or student support, have you found effective in encouraging engagement and motivation? 

Sarah Ison: So I’ll focus probably more on student support. And, as Brena said, she’s not directly student facing. And I’m probably the only one in the Online Distance Learning team at Sussex who is seeing students regularly. And so which is nice because then I get feedback and get quite a lot of dialogue with them. And there is a Student Success team that also provides a lot of support for them, very personalized. They call up the students, check how they’re doing. And I liaise with them to make sure that they’re aware of any updates I’ve given to the SOS or like with AI. There’s a lot of relatively new content that’s gone on the Sussex website that I’m drawing attention to in my sessions. So I’m telling Student Success, this is what I’m telling them so that, you know, if you get a call from a student, you know, to talk about progress and they’re like, “Oh, AI, can I use that?” then they won’t be like, “Oh, what’s the latest advice?” You know, I have a good sort of bridge between them to make sure we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet. And, so, yeah, I support through kind of the session and just being there for students and providing drop-in sessions throughout the module. And the one-to-one element really works well. Obviously, you can’t provide that to everyone, it would be impossible, but so far, it’s not become overwhelming. And there’s a student I’ve engaged quite a lot with who has come to realize that she thinks she’s got ADHD. She’s awaiting a proper diagnosis, but we’ve talked a lot about how to, well, I’ve been trying to help her how to compartmentalize the different things she has to do because she gets so overwhelmed by the amount of reading, the amount of learning she has to do. So we’ve worked together to try and break it all down and think about how she can approach her module. Probably goes slightly beyond my remit, but in terms of managing her readings and the library work and the research skills. She’s like, “Life hacks! Give me life hacks!” I’m like, “Okay. Here’s some top tips from last Tuesday”. But, yeah, we talked about how she thinks her brain works. And that has really helped me think about how can we be inclusive. How can we just offer stuff from the get-go, from the beginning that is accessible to everyone, no matter if they’re neurodivergent or neurotypical. How people learn is so varied that the way that we and the team work together really helps each other because that really informs the, like, the handouts that I provide, you know, the online resources, and what I put on the SOS. You know, I’ve got that in my mind, “This has got to be accessible and inclusive”. And, yeah, trying to provide videos at the point of need that people can dip into and won’t take too long to go through is kind of a key way that I provide support to the students. So, yeah, trying to do the personalized thing one-to-one is really important, but you can’t do that for everyone. And so, therefore, the more generic videos, you just try and make them as inclusive as possible. So that’s kind of my main methods of trying to do that through videos, the SOS, and one-to-one and live sessions.

Heather Taylor (12:24): You know what? I think, you know, like you said, “But you can’t do it for everyone,” and you’re completely right. But I think importantly, you know, and on theme, it isn’t for everyone, is it? Some people don’t want one-to-one. Some people, you know, prefer to just, some people prefer to absorb information relatively passively. Some people want to engage with it and, you know, in different ways. So, actually, yeah, that’s great.

Brena Collyer De Aguiar: I think for ODL students, the design of the modules, so we have a very strong element of consistency across all modules and pages, which then reduces that cognitive anxiety they would have, you know, on trying to look for the information. And also thinking about, you know, it’s student-centered, so it’s thinking about removing as many barriers as we can. So, like, you know, in most of the modules, for example, would have links directly to the guides and to the Study Hub and signposting the resources and examples. For example, we really work with templates, templates for submissions, templates for information. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in terms of engagement in a couple of projects that we used. We gamified a module, for example, and that kind of made them travel in time, so that was a very engaging experience. So, I’ve, like I said, I am on top of UDL fun. I’m a playful person, and I, you know, I love immersive experience. So every time I can put my finger there, it’s like, “Let’s do something fun”. Of course, you know, like I said, in terms of consistency, not only in the layout, the learning is structured. So they have three different learning phases, which they are encouraged to, you know, go through the lecture content, go through applying those, the learning, but also reflecting on that on top of having spaces for creating community, engaging with, you know, throughout the cohort. Yeah. And flexibility. You know, you can, you can show your presence in different ways and also, you know, in different formats. 

In terms of engagement, that’s the only thing that I don’t know if I should say this, is the tutor presence really makes an impact. We have, for example, I’m telling you about a lot of stuff in terms of design. But if the tutor is not engaged, if the tutor doesn’t show his presence on the discussion boards, for example, try to promote the, the discussion, you know, to continue or use announcements in Canvas and show that that module is live and that the teacher is there, you see a huge, you know, difference in terms of engagement. In opposite, if you have a tutor that is really there, and I know the challenge, you know, and we have large cohort modules, which then we require bigger teaching teams, you see that the experience is completely different. So it’s a mix of putting the, you know, designing but making very clear that the human element is there.

Heather Taylor (15:23): Yeah. I think they’re so important. I think even when you’re, you know, when you’re lecturing in person, obviously, like, if I’m lecturing in person, I have to be there and engaging because I’m there. But being just even being enthusiastic about it makes a big difference to the students. They’re not gonna get enthusiastic about something that I sound bored of, right? And I completely get what you’re saying with this, the tutor engagement. If the tutor is not engaging with the with the, you know, online resources and discussion boards and so on that you’ve got, the students essentially are probably gonna think, “Oh, this isn’t really necessary”. “You know, if they’re not doing it, why would I do it?” you know? So, yeah, that’s quite a challenge, though, for you then because then you’re sort of, you know, you’ve made something good. It just needs to be delivered the way you intended it to be delivered. 

Wendy Garnham: I love the idea of the gamification. That sounds really good.

Sarah Ison: I was very emotional when you launched that module. It was at the Educational Festival, wasn’t it? And you worked, you collaborated with the academic, and it was amazing. They did, like, this preview. It was like a film premiere. I was really like, “Oh my gosh. I want to study this module”. And I’m not even, you know, I’m interested in Sustainable Development, but it’s not my thing to study. And I was just like, “Wow, this is amazing”. And I felt so proud of you because it was such a different sort of module, completely different to gamify that. And it’s had some amazing positive reviews, isn’t it? Yeah.

Brena Collyer De Aguiar: It is. It’s called, we renamed the module. We called Project Dandelion. And, you know, when you, when you think about, and I know that I again, most of the immersion in that gamification was made through storytelling. So it’s, we really thought the narrative to bring to put the students into that story. We also, the thing that I thought was really good on that as well was because the module was quite depressive, because we were talking about the climate change and waste, etc. So it was a way to actually, how do you say? Swift. Instead of the end being bad, we said, “Okay, we sorted it out. Now you need to travel back in time and figure out what we’ve done”. So then you can see that they are much more in a much happier place, you know. They connect to the emotions and what they could do. Storytelling. Storytelling. And it’s, you know, everyone, we are all, don’t they say that since, you know, the beginnings, every human being is a storyteller? No, we grew telling stories. I love that, so I, I need to stop talking.

Heather Taylor: That is so, so clever though, when you say it, though, because it’s depressing. But you really don’t want to end a module with the world being on fire, do you? You know?

Wendy Garnham: So ODL students at Sussex show strong academic outcomes, including low levels of academic misconduct, I’m pleased to say. How do you support students’ academic literacies, particularly for those returning to study or unfamiliar with the UK academic context? 

Brena Collyer De Aguiar (18:23): All academics involved on teaching an ODL module, they need to attend what we call the ODL essential training. The first one, it’s about the teaching, and the second one is about marking because, you know, they are all online, so it’s a bit different than what we do on campus. And on the essential training, I bring, you know, the awareness, so it’s user-centric. It’s making sure they understand that they are dealing with people that are around the world, that they may be too far from, you know, the academy, or if they were close, like me, for example, struggle with the referencing here. You know? Just to make them very aware that those challenges are present. They can’t just assume that they are UK-based students and signposting the resources. So where would you go for support or, you know, flagging that Sarah is there, the module is there, as well as I’ve mentioned before, in the syllabus page and then kind of important places throughout the modules, that always link to resources and to further module information as well as support. The other support moment we have is every time a module, ODL module runs, we have the module survey. And that kind of triggers what we call the module evaluation is where we will be sitting, you know, the development team, the pedagogic advice team, the academic with the survey and reflect further. So every time there is an academic literacy challenge or, you know, it’s always going back and thinking, do we need to signpost more resources? Do we need to have Sarah stepping in into the first welcome live session to point them, you know, how to access those specific resources at the library? And hopefully, you know, addressing the challenge and improving every time the module runs.

Sarah Ison: In the last couple of years, I embedded a few new slides into my live session that I do in the first week of every module, acknowledging the cultural differences when it comes to referencing and what people’s experience might have been in whatever geographical place they’re in. Because one of the academics on ODL told me once how all the way up through her master’s, she was in South America, and she never had to reference, like, anything. It just wasn’t done, you didn’t need to, you could just write, and that was your essay. You handed it in. Fine. And how different is that here? And so I’m then, it just made me think, well, I can’t assume that all the students joining know the UK Western way of referencing and exactly how it should be unless it’s made really explicit. And academics and people like myself, I think, in a support position have a really important job to make that as clear as possible from the beginning. So I see it as a privilege that I meet these students. I try and make it really clear that what they’ve been used to might be different to what’s expected now. So I try and be really clear about, you know, academic misconduct, what that actually means and how to avoid that and the importance of referencing and how you must cite your sources. You must say where those ideas came from. And I really kind of drive that home. 

And I was able to kind of adopt the university’s academic practice online workshop. So that’s a Canvas site that students get referred to after an initial case of academic misconduct. They then have to work through it, understand what it means by collusion and academic misconduct, etc. They have to work through that and then it’s a quiz and they have to be checked off that they’ve done it. So I was able to offer that from the beginning. I promote that to the students. They’re all, all ODL students are enrolled on it. They’ve got access to it. We’re in the process of updating it at the moment with other key colleagues from the university. But using it proactively to say, “Have a look at this”. “You know, you might end up coming back here if you were accidentally, you know, plagiarized or something”. “But here’s the information”. “You know, it’s optional, but please do, you know, invest some time in understanding how to avoid academic misconduct”. So trying to be strategic and always mentioning about referencing the importance of it. But I think it was really important to address the cultural differences and not assume everyone knows what’s going on just because they’ve enrolled at Sussex. They don’t necessarily know what’s expected when it comes to that because it might be so different to what they’re used to. 

And, we now have a dedicated Online Distance Learning librarian inbox, so students can just fire off questions, and it’ll be covered by me or a couple of my colleagues in the library. There’s always a place students can come to ask. As most librarians will say, if we don’t know the answer, then we’ll probably know where to find the answer and connect you with the information that you need. That’s one of the best things of the job. One of my colleagues does say, she doesn’t quite know how I get so excited about academic skills, but, you know, she’s like, “I feel really inspired now to think about, you know, reading and writing”. And I just, I get excited when I connect people with the information that they need. And a lot of my job is signposting, helping people find what they need, to achieve what they need, but also to avoid important things like academic misconduct.

Wendy Garnham (23:11): I think that is important not to make too many assumptions about what people are bringing to the learning session. So I think it’s quite easy when you’ve been delivering content for some time just to assume that there are certain sort of basic levels of understanding that may not necessarily be there, certainly with quite a diverse cohort. So it’s a good reminder.

Heather Taylor: Yeah. Brena, what are the key things you’ve learned from supporting Online Distance Learning students, and what advice would you offer to academic staff, whether teaching online, in hybrid mode, or face to face about inclusive practice, engagement, and student-centered course design? 

Brena Collyer De Aguiar: You probably can sense. I’m not from the UK. So I, I’ve linked my experience with my work as well in terms of diversity and coming from a different cultural background. And I would say that for me, one of the things that I’ve learned more is about expectations. So online learning, you know, requires a lot of expectations to be set. And this should be part of the design from the beginning to the end. Expectations in terms of time that you’ll be spending on that learning, expectation about how, language, you know, technical expectations as well. From the expectations, making sure that the design and my thinking and my advice really brings inclusion as the focus. Like, let’s think further. I was aware, already applying to my kind of other software design work, but now it’s an accessibility that goes beyond. And to understand and probably showcase that, you know, by having the content accessible, you’re not only benefiting students who need, you’re also promoting different ways, you know, for everyone to access the information. 

In terms of our advice, and those kind of link very well with the UDL principles, you know, it’s for me, again, being from Brazil, we are all about emotions and feelings. So it’s trying to bring some empathy, pedagogy to your practice. You know, try to promote connection and presence. And when I talk these usually, I flag that this also includes the tutor. So it’s about enabling, you know, that space for everyone, not just the learners, but everyone involved on that caring learning community that, again, enables a better learning space. Joy and fun. I’m all over playful learning, immersion, storytelling. There are, you know, you don’t need to be a pro. You, you know, there are small things you can add to your learning and teaching practice that can make learning more fun. And I would say not promoting ourselves, reflect and develop, you know. I would say if you could and I know some module leaders would do the reflection session in the end with the students to bring their perspectives, what they missed. But as well, you know, connect with your colleagues that had similar experience, and, of course, the resources and the training available.

Sarah Ison: Yeah. I feel I feel like I’ve learned a lot about, just the importance of accessibility and learning design and how that relates to being inclusive. And a way in which that’s been more personal for me has been working with people who are neurodivergent and have really clearly explained to me what helps them work well in a team, what helps them work when I was managing them kind of in that relationship. And then that’s helped me think about, “Okay, what about neurodivergent students?” How are they going to see what we’re offering and what small things can we do, as Brena said, “What small things can we tweak that actually makes all the difference to those learners and is accessible for everyone?” It’s not making it harder for neurotypical people. It’s just making everything easier for everyone. And so that’s kind of my key thing for this question, really, that considering how other people learn and take on that information. If you think about that in terms of what you’re asking them to read, if you’re an academic and you’re building a module, you know, think about how you’ve laid out your reading list material, how clear you’re being about what the expectations are. You know, if there’s a group assignment, how that’s going to be, you know, processed by someone, you know, that’s not you. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is so important to just trying to be inclusive. And as with Brena, I’m haven’t done a lot myself, but playful learning is such an amazing way to learn. And so I want to kind of find more ways of doing that in the opportunities that I have through working with ODL students. But, yeah, small things make a big difference. So remembering that as you go forward will hopefully be a good thing.

Wendy Garnham (27:52): It sounds as though one of the real strengths is sort of being able to draw students in to sort of experience what they’re learning about or to at least, as we’ve said, like, immersing them in that. So I guess, so is that more difficult with Online Distance Learning compared to when you’ve actually got students in the room with you? 

Sarah Ison: There’s so many tools we can use now to just break out into groups and to collaborate in so many different ways using Padlet boards and other kind of tools that just help you just get ideas together to work together. And we have this amazing relationship in our teams where although we’re made up of three quite distinct groups of colleagues and our work doesn’t always overlap, we have this brilliant, like, connection where because we have short regular meetings as a whole team, we use all these different tools that we could use when working with students as well. You know, I’ve used a Padlet board sometimes where I’ve said, “How are you feeling, students, about you at the start of your module? This side, put up emojis and pictures, whatever. If you’re feeling a bit, you know, negative about stuff, if you’re feeling good, work on this side”. And then at a glance, I could get people’s instant reflections on how they’re feeling about what I was about to talk to them about, which helped me to then possibly adapt my approach to the rest of that session. So you have to be quite flexible and fluid and be able to perhaps, you know, stray a bit from what you might have been planning. So if everyone suddenly says, “I’m really scared about reading long articles because I’ve, you know, had a break in study, and I don’t even know how to read an academic article”. You might think, “Oh, okay, if 20 people are saying that, I better focus on that in this session and maybe talk less about reading eBooks or something”. You know, there might be different things you can focus on. And when you bring that interactiveness into a session and you get other students’ input, it shapes what you do, but they feel listened to and that’s, you know, inclusive.

Wendy Garnham: Yeah. Sarah Ison and Brena Collier de Aguiar, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you. And thank you for listening. Goodbye.

Heather Taylor:

This has been the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex created by Sarah Watson, Wendy Garnham, and Heather Taylor, and produced by Simon Overton. For more episodes as well as articles, blogs, case studies, and infographics, please visit blogs.sussex.ac.uk/learning-matters.

Keep listening for some bonus chat about today’s topic. 

Heather Taylor (30:32): I guess as well, you know, I think these students have decided for whatever reason, they want to do an online course, and I think that can make a really big difference in terms of when we’re trying to deliver something. I think the problem sometimes with having online resources for in-person students is they are quite passive with it sometimes, you know, whereas these students are choosing to do this.

And I think that, you know, remember that year when we was all with the COVID? Remember COVID? And, anyone who signed up to come to the uni knew right from the beginning, it’s going on. It’s all gonna be online, right? I think they knew from the outset, didn’t they? Yeah. Because of the timing of the government or whatever. But, I’m not allowed to mumble. Sorry, Simon. Yeah. And I think that, actually, that year, and it really made me think about it because you both talked about empathy. So you were talking about empathy. You were talking about the importance of connecting, listening, responding. And I actually think that year with the with the students who were all online, I don’t feel as though I had any less of a bond with them or any less of a rapport or, and I think it’s because we all signed up to the same thing, right? And I did tell them at the beginning, “I haven’t taught online really before, I want you to get the best out of this. In order for you to get the best out of this, you gotta work with me, you gotta help me – you gotta get involved – you gotta use the chat, you gotta use the discussion”. And they were so committed. They were so lovely, weren’t they? 

Wendy Garnham: They were really engaged.

Heather Taylor: So I think, yeah. And I think, you know, I don’t know. I think that’s really important, though, making, you know, it’s really lovely that we have these online courses because for some people, that is just better. It’s going to suit them better. It’s going to suit, you know, around their schedule or just even the way they like to learn. So I’m really pleased that you’ve not just and I know you wouldn’t do this anyway, but I’m really pleased that, you know, you didn’t just take something that was a standard course and go, “We just say it online”. You know? And you’ve gone, “All right, how can we make this good?” “How can we make it engaging?” “How can we make it meaningful?” “How can we connect with the students?” And I think that’s such a, you know, fantastic thing, basically.

Wendy Garnham: I think just making the students feel heard is like the absolute bottom line because I think also when you’ve got big groups, I mean, it sounds as though you have got quite big groups for the online courses. And, you know, as great as that is, it’s still like, the bottom line is, how do you then make all of those students feel heard as individual? And I think some of the things that you shared are really sort of going to promote that sense of, you know, “I matter, I was seen in this course or, the tutor’s hearing me”. And I think that is, it’s quite hard to get to that level, but I think it’d be useful no matter who’s teaching what, in what context. I think that’s sort of quite a key message for me to take from that.

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The Scholarship Journey: Cultivating Scholarship Through Growth and Connection during Scholarship Leave

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A woman (Jo Tregenza) with shoulder-length brown hair wearing a black-and-white checkered shirt, standing in front of a light wooden panel background
A woman (Jo Tregenza) with shoulder-length brown hair wearing a black-and-white checkered shirt, standing in front of a light wooden panel background

Jo Tregenza is a Reader in Primary Education at the University of Sussex, and Senior Leader with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry. Skilled in, Primary Education, Teaching English, E-Learning, Lecturing, Teaching and Higher Education. Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Association. Founding Fellow of the Chartered College of Teachers. President of the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA).  She received several teaching awards, including 2018 Innovative Teaching Award for the whole ITE team, in 2015: USSU Teaching Award 2016 and Outstanding and Innovative Postgraduate teaching award.

What inspired you to frame scholarship as a journey and use the growth metaphor throughout the presentation?

So I just can’t get away from using plants and nature. I think partly because something that’s really in my mind is the organic process. So it’s not never terribly strategic about it. It sort of grows and develops. I first became a teacher because I wanted to teach children how to see daffodils and it’s that sort of theme has threaded through.

So then when I started teaching students, I gave them a seed or a bulb every year, and I’ve planted one for every one of the students I’ve ever trained. I’ve got a lot of bulbs in the garden now – it’s very pretty in spring.

And this just keeps coming back. The model I’m coming to with my PhD is of teaching reading, which is coming from a tree approach where it starts with the roots and soil and grows and so I just think it’s just how my brain works.

And I want it to see that it’s a cycle almost. It keeps going, there’s that cyclical approach to it, but its also the nourishing, I think.  The soil, the sun, the water, everything that comes in to nourish it.

How did you decide which personal experiences to include and what impact do you hope sharing them will have on your audience?

I was trying to aim at the people that I thought maybe were on scholarship and thought they would never ever get promotion or anything. And so showing that you can, because I mean, as I say, I’ve got to this stage without a PhD. Hopefully, I’ll have one soon, but, I wanted to make people feel that there was a root within the university. It might take a long time and in my case it has been a very long time but I think the things that have happened more recently are making quite big substantial differences.

So you can see this sort of slow journey in what I put, and the difference, what the key thing was is putting the policy that we had access to study leave, and that’s a massive change for us. But I’m well aware it’s not going to be consistent across the university and given we’re making faculties, the hope that we could have that sort of thing consistently for everybody would be really good. So it was like a key message.

What impact has this had on student learning, curriculum design, or academic practice more broadly?

So it turned out that we were changing all our modules anyway. My English was merging with maths. So I wasn’t going to rewrite everything because I thought, oh, I’ll just merge it with maths, that’d be fine, but because of the work I’d done and the research I’ve been looking at in reading particularly and the connections I made I ended up completely rewriting everything which I’m regretting today because it’s an awful lot of work to do.

I think I was always aware of what was going on outside, but now I’m deeply involved with what’s going on in the curriculum, in and other pockets, so I’ve become very involved because of my study leave, the anti racism work, I’ve become very involved in play. I became very involved in AI. So all of those I’ve embedded completely into what we’ve been teaching and the disadvantage bit has become a theme right through the modules as well. So it has been completely embedded in everything, so it has affected curriculum design on what we’re teaching the students and they’re loving it.

They’re buzzing which is really nice. You know, I keep meeting them and they want me to teach them every day and it’s lovely so they’re really liking that it’s very current but it’s also very embedded in practice.  

And in terms of academics, more practice, more broadly, That’s where the networks come in because I’ve been feeding all of that into a network of special interest groups of IT providers across the country. So I’ve already led one session with them, and because of the connections I made, I’m bringing in speakers. So I’m trying to affect, for example, the way universities teach writing to primary schools, and I’m doing that by bringing people in from Ireland and just trying to shape things a little bit.

You emphasized collaboration networks. What strategies work best for building those connections during your scholarship leave?

So LinkedIn was life changing for me, and I had it and didn’t really use it. I thought it was just a bit of a pointless thing.  My daughter started nagging me saying, mum, you have to change your LinkedIn profile, and she started to lecture me on how to use it and I had to listen in the end.  And it really did change it, which meant she was right, very annoying.  

I’d started to really build those connections far more succinctly, and LinkedIn led to all the connections in play, all the connections with anti racism, all of that came from that. I’ve now met with the CEO of First News, in fact, this week as a result of that. So all of those have really built.

I had the advantage of having a few very strong networks anyway so, the UK, but I was able to put more time into that so I set aside time in my study leave to plan the conference. I couldn’t have done that without having study leave. I did it the previous year without study leave but I ran the conference here and that was manageable but not in Liverpool. So yeah LinkedIn was the main thing and then just nurturing those connections was probably the most important.

Looking back, which part of your plan was most challenging to achieve, and what would you do differently next time?

Oh, you know it. It’s the National Teaching Fellowship, I still haven’t done it. I’d arranged with Claire from the medical department, who’s going to help me and have a look at it and I’ve got everything arranged, but I just didn’t have time, and that’s so I set myself too many targets in that respect, and something had to give, and it was that.

It’s a huge amount of work and that I suppose is I what I would have done differently, I would have blocked maybe a month of time that was purely for that. I think that’s the way to do it, is block the time, but something else would have had to give, and it would have been the anti racism stuff because that sort of grew and I knew that was an indulgent passion in a way, but I felt that it really needed to be done. And I it’s paid off because that is now going to be something national, so it’s important. We have to do it. It’s organic as I say, we’re going to kind of a branch for the moment.

What do you see as the long-term impact of your scholarship work—on your own career, your institution, and the wider academic community?

It would be nice to be able to apply for professorship, I do feel I’ve got more than enough evidence for that now so I’m hoping that that would work but what it will do, it’s the wider thing for me, is that I’ve already been invited to Dublin as a guest to their Celebration conference. and Norway and Slovenia, and they want me to present my work.

The work I’m doing with my PhD is going to be significant and I know it is even though it’s only three schools  It’s challenging what’s happening in the world at the moment. Everyone’s saying there’s a problem with reading, everyone’s saying we’ve got so many disadvantaged children and our government’s answer is more phonics tests and what I’ve got is challenging that and so I’m really poised.

Hopefully now I’ve got enough that I can get small papers out and I’m able to so I’m going to present in Cyprus hopefully in February, Slovenia and Glasgow in July, so I’m getting things out and I was able to present to the DFE a little while ago, so it pushed me ahead of my PhD timeline I because I knew I needed to swing out the policy. So yes, that’ll be the plan.

Posted in Case Studies

Conversations on teaching for community and belonging: Our blog collection

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Dr Emily Danvers

Conversations around teaching rarely happen beyond formal training opportunities that often take place early on in our careers. After this, and especially during term-time, space for talking  in our busy working lives is often limited. Incidental corridor chats are seen to generate a collaborative and positive working culture and, for some, were mourned during the pandemic and its aftermath. Indeed, post-COVID (or maybe this was always the case?), we rarely have time to talk to our colleagues about anything at all. When it comes to teaching, who do we approach when things go well, or not so well? Who is talking? Who is listening? And who cares? This was the premise for our project, drawing colleagues together across the then newly formed Faculty of Social Sciences, to talk about how we facilitate conversations about teaching, and our wider working lives, to enhance a sense of community and belonging for staff.

The conversation theme was inspired by Jarvis and Clark (2020) whose work emphasises how the informality of a conversation about teaching flattens power relations and allows people to make meaning together without the intensity of an agenda or outcome. They position this work in contrast to formal teaching observations with their traces of surveillance, performance and measurement. Too often we rely on these individualised encounters to ‘develop’ teachers, where in fact, authentic conversations might more meaningfully transform teaching, where colleagues hear something, share together and be inspired by each other in the everyday. This reflects Zeldin (1998, p.14) who notes that: ‘when minds meet they don’t just exchange facts; they transform them, draw implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. A conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards; it creates new cards.

With the provocation to encourage transformation through talking together, Emily, Suda and Verona set up an initial launch event for all the faculty to generate some initial conversations about teaching. The questions and topics that emerged from this focused on the following questions.

  1. Why is community and belonging important for diverse academic flourishing?
  2. How and where is community and belonging created and developed?
  3. How might the labour of community and belonging work become visible, valued and rewarded?

The 12 colleagues who attended were afterwards put in cross-faculty threes and connected by email, with suggestions that they meet again to continue these conversations. As project leads, we were deliberately hands-off at this point, as the purpose of this project is to see if and how these conversations form organically.

A couple of months later, 5 of us met to blog together for the day, about our response to the questions, along with other themes that came up along the way. What we share in this blog collection is the story of our collaboration conversations.

In Jeanette and Fiona’s blog, they talk about what we can learn from student collaborations, which are often and rightly prioritised in the work of higher education.

In Suda and May’s blog they write about the value of time and space to slow down the academic pace and to generate community.

In Emily’s blog, she talks about the joy and challenges of teaching across different disciplines and how collaborations are structurally challenging.

What we learnt from this project is the ethics and timeliness of the conversation format, as a collegiate response to the complex and evolving challenges facing the sector, our students and ourselves as teachers. We all relished time to talk and think about the uncertain, the tricky, the everyday, the thorny, the unequal, the caring and uncaring practices – all of this important ‘stuff’ that sustains us as teachers but has no space in our working lives. We also did not only talk about teaching but about other collaborations that we value.

Our recommendation is that teaching (and other) collaborations should be exploratory and conversational rather than only a tool for appraisal, What we are seeking is regular open and meaningful dialogue about teaching and academic working lives that is not  ‘done to academics at the behest of institutional leaders’ but conversations  ‘with or among colleagues, characterized by mutual respect, reciprocity, and the sharing of values and practices’ (Pleschová et al, 2021:201).

References

Jarvis, J., & Clark, K. (2020). Conversations to Change Teaching. (1st ed.) (Critical Practice in Higher Education). Critical Publishing Ltd.

Zeldin. T. (1998). Conversational Leadership https://conversational-leadership.net/ [Accessed 15.07.2025}/

Pleschová, G., Roxå, T., Thomson, K. E., & Felten, P. (2021). Conversations that make meaningful change in teaching, teachers, and academic development. International Journal for Academic Development, 26(3), 201–209.

Getting the ‘social’ into Social Sciences: how can we learn from LPS student initiatives to build cross-faculty relationships?

Jeanette Ashton and Fiona Clements

The broader context

When the new faculty structure at Sussex was first mentioned, discussed further at university-wide forums and School and Department meetings, our reaction was perhaps similar to many others. Whilst ‘indifferent’ might be too strong, our thinking was that this was a decision taken at a university leadership level which probably wouldn’t change much on the ground, aside from potential pooling of resources in a challenging higher education climate. We felt that any changes we needed to make would filter down in time through our Head of Department, but that, in short, it would remain ‘business as usual’ for the Law School. The ‘Conversations on Teaching for Community and Belonging’ initiative by Emily Danvers gave us an opportunity to explore how the new faculty structure might enable us to develop supportive relationships with colleagues outside of our department, what that might look like and how it may help us navigate challenges going forward post the voluntary leavers scheme.

In the last few years of her role as Deputy Director of Student Experience for LPS, Fiona developed a number of initiatives which were well-received by the student body. In this piece, we consider how we might draw from those initiatives to develop a faculty-wide space, but with a staff rather than student focus. That is not to say that building faculty wide student relationships is not important, but that, as Ni Drisceoil (2025) discusses in her critique of what student ‘belonging’ means and who does that work, staff community and belonging often takes a backseat. We conclude with some thoughts as to how we might move forward.

Community and belonging sessions for students in LPS – what did we do and why did we do it?

For the last couple of years in LPS, we have hosted a weekly breakfast or lunch event for students. We know that very many of the students find that the peers that they share their first year accommodation with end up being some of their closest friends – both at university and beyond. Friendships are also forged at departmental level but, in addition, we wanted to give the students an opportunity to come together, informally, and meet students from other departments in the school.

The get together would happen in the same room, the student common room, at the same time each week. As the Law school runs a two week timetable, it meant that different Law students would be available to attend, depending on whether it was an even week or an odd week. There was a small group of students from each department who would come every week, but we also had new faces at every get together – students who had heard about the event, or students who just happened to be in the common room when the event was happening.

When we asked the students about their motivation for attending, they gave a variety of different reasons. It was interesting to note that some of the students came to the event with the intention of seeking advice (perhaps about managing workload, or how to tackle their reading etc). The students found that having a casual conversation with a member of faculty whilst sharing some food was a preferable option to pursuing the more formal route of booking an office hour with an academic advisor whom they may know less well.

LPS Staff events: what can we learn?

In thinking about faculty-wide initiatives, it’s important to consider what is already happening in schools and departments and what we might learn from that. In LPS, we have online school forums, which are well-attended by both academic and professional services staff and a useful way to catch up on what’s happening at School level. In terms of more socially oriented events, we have regular ‘Coffee and Cake’ sessions, which are not well attended. Without undertaking a survey, we can’t provide reasons for this, but it may be that this being a Head of School initiative and booked into our calendars, gives the impression that this is a space where we might be able to socialise, but not share concerns and ask ‘silly’ questions. Time is of course also a factor, with events such as these falling down the priority list as we juggle competing responsibilities. An open plan office space for professional services staff is perhaps more conducive to those conversations than the academic offices, so it could be that a faculty wide space for academic staff would provide an opportunity to have those conversations, with the benefit of perspectives as to what happens elsewhere.

What might be possible in the new faculty? Some ideas:

· Twice monthly scheduled spaces at different times on different days, and starting on the half hour, to maximise faculty availability

· A small cross-faculty team to rotate the ‘host’ role and spread the word in the different departments. As discussed above, a friendly facilitator was pivotal to the success of the LPS student initiatives

· Keep organisation minimal, and be clear that this is not a leadership initiative

· Clear comms on the purpose of the space: to drop in, meet people, share ideas and concerns, ask questions in an informal space without needing to schedule a meeting

· No need for food! No need for themes!

· Don’t be discouraged if no one turns up. These things take time.

References and further reading

Ní Drisceoil, V. (2025): Critiquing commitments to community and belonging in today’s law school: who does the labour?, The Law Teacher, DOI: 10.1080/03069400.2025.2492444

For more on community and belonging for students see Moore, I. and Ní Drisceoil, V. ‘Wellbeing and transition to law school: the complexities of confidence, community, and belonging’ in Jones, E.  and Strevens, C. (Eds.) Wellbeing and Transitions in Law: Legal Education and the Legal Profession (Palgrave Macmillan 2023).

Slowing Down the Hamster Wheel: Space to Reflect and Create Communities.

May Nasrawy and Suda Perera

A cartoon hamster runs on a wheel labeled with academic pressures like “Publish,” “Teach,” and “Grants,” surrounded by the word “STRESS!” and thought bubbles promoting reflection and community.

Since we’ve been teaching at Sussex, it’s felt like we’ve been in a state of perma-crisis: Strikes, pandemics, financial losses, have all contributed to a sense that we are on the brink of imminent disaster and we need to react quickly to avert an impending collapse. In this context a lot of pressure is put on as individual academics to do more and more with less and less. We need to teach more students and give them extra support even though there are fewer resources. We need to bring in more grants even though funding sources are shrinking, and publish more research in an increasingly narrowing field of “world leading” journals. Failure to do this, we are told, is an existential threat to the University and could result in more job losses, including our own. This sense of existential dread has meant that many of us feel like hamsters in a wheel – desperately scrambling from one task to the next in an attempt to just keep going and hope that eventually things will calm down. But the calm never seems to come, and in this highly individualised and reactionary wheel of toxic productivity, we seem to have lost a sense of community and belonging. In this blog we consider: Where in this endless cycle of work and crises is there space to think and reflect on why we’re doing this both as individuals and as a community? How can we break the vicious cycle of individualism and reaction and instead foster an environment where there is space to think and reflect in a collective and collaborative way to build the kind of University that we want?

By participating in the Conversations for Teaching for Community and Belonging, we have come to realise that there is a community of like-minded staff members who feel similarly , and that the answer to these questions begins with time and space. Time to step away from the hamster wheel of toxic productivity. Space to reflect on our individual identities and sense of purpose. Space to support and be supported by our colleagues. And from that space to foster a wider sense of community and belonging. This space requires us to have protected and meaningful time to just think and discuss with each other these bigger-picture and wider issues, which are not easily captured in bureaucratic processes. So much of the day-to-day running of the university relies on labours of caring and collegiality, and yet so much of this labour is hidden and not celebrated or even spoken about. We don’t want these spaces to be just one-off lip-service events or individualised awards, but rather collective spaces to talk through issues and share experiences with no expectation of a measurable output. By setting aside time for reflection, we argue we can move away from these feeling of constant reaction to immediate crises.

In the short time that we’ve had to engage in conversations with one another in this small project, we have been able to learn about what colleagues across faculties are doing in their teaching and research, and also share experiences that are point to issues of both concern and hope. We have been able to foster a sense of openness precisely because there is no sense that we are in competition for some sort of reward at the end, or that we have to produce something to demonstrate “value for money”. While we appreciate that much of what we do on the hamster-wheel of productivity is part of the job, we argue that it shouldn’t take up all the space, and should not be moving us away from other essential elements of our practice that require us to slow down to reflect, learn, collaborate, feel, care, read, and think.

Cross-faculty teaching: favour culture vs collaboration

Emily Danvers

Across the faculty of social sciences, many of us share research interests, professional expertise and academic knowledge that shape the topics we teach. When we met to collaborate on this project, for example, we found most of us teach about issues related to education, social justice, and globalisation. Yet we rarely teach outside the confines of our disciplines and departments. And where we do, it is through favours and friendships, rather than anything structurally organised. Our compartmentalised teaching arrangements often produce a culture that can work against collaboration.

A couple of years ago, Jeanette and I met through a shared interest in education for those of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller heritages. This was an area I research, and Jeanette had just started a community legal education initiative, Street Law, in partnership with the community organisation Friends, Families and Travellers. She asked me whether I’d talk to her students about teaching. Of course, I’d love to. I liked her. I liked the project. It was my area of expertise. Why not?

I’ve since done this a couple of times and get a huge amount from teaching Law students who I normally would never get to meet. Thinking about their contexts, disciplines and experiences and translating my pedagogical knowledge to them is also a useful exercise in understanding what and why I prioritise as an educator.  But it isn’t in my workload. I don’t have to and am not, directly ‘rewarded’, in the very narrow sense of my own time.  Jeanette confesses in our collaboration project that she feels guilty about asking me. But we work in the same university and now in the same faculty. Why shouldn’t we teach across these artificial academic boundaries?

This raises questions about how much of academic life might be sustained by these sorts of favours. It reminds me of the complicated emotions of gift-giving, where the receiver bestows something with surrounding norms of exchange and appreciation. On the one hand, forging positive relationships and having reciprocal practices of care are important ways to navigate academic work and its pressures (Frossard and Jeursen, 2019). Doing this cross-faculty teaching was joyful and enriching – a ‘gift’ to me as well as Jeanette. Also, an academy where we only did what was in our job description would surely fall apart!

But, on the other hand, these practices lead to under-recognition of labour or overwork. Academia has long been organised into silos – whether departments or modules – producing a sort of bento-box style organisation rather than a rich, interdisciplinary tasty stew. It is only when trying to foster collaboration through teaching across departments that we notice how the structures and cultures produce or preclude the kinds of interdisciplinary work we may find personally enriching.

In reflecting on this experience, what becomes clear is the tension between the joy and enrichment of interdisciplinary collaboration and the structural barriers that make such collaboration exceptional rather than expected. While cross-faculty teaching can feel like a ‘gift’—personally fulfilling and intellectually stimulating—it also reveals the fragility of a system that relies on goodwill rather than institutional support. When collaboration is sustained through favours rather than formal recognition, it risks becoming invisible labour, disproportionately carried by those with the capacity or inclination to give more than is required. If we want to foster truly interdisciplinary, socially engaged teaching that reflects our shared academic interests and values, we need to rethink how work is recognised, rewarded, and organised. Moving beyond the bento-box model of academic life will mean embracing new structures that not only encourage, but also sustain, collaboration across boundaries.

Frossard, C., & Jeursen, T. (2019). Friends and Favours: Friendship as Care at the ‘More-Than-Neoliberal’ University. Etnofoor, 31(1), 113–126. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26727103

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Getting the ‘social’ into Social Sciences: how can we learn from LPS student initiatives to build cross-faculty relationships?

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Jeanette Ashton and Fiona Clements

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Episode 11: Attention, Sleep, and Learning

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The Learning Matters Podcast captures insights into, experiences of, and conversations around education at the University of Sussex. The podcast is hosted by Prof Wendy Garnham and Dr Heather Taylor. It is recorded monthly, and each month is centred around a particular theme. The theme of our eleventh episode is on attention, sleep and learning and our guests are Dr Sophie Forster, Reader in Cognitive Neuroscience, and Dr Giulia Poerio, Senior Lecturer in Psychology. Our names are Wendy Garnham and Heather Taylor, and we are your presenters today. Welcome, everyone.

Recording

Listen to the recording of Episode 11 on Spotify.

Transcript

Wendy Garnham: 

Welcome to the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex where we capture insights, experiences, and conversations around education at our institution and beyond. Our theme for this episode is Attention, Sleep, and Learning. And our guests are Dr Sophie Forster, Reader in Cognitive Neuroscience, and Doctor Giulia Poerio, Senior Lecturer in Psychology. Our names are Wendy Garnham and Heather Taylor, and we are your presenters today. Welcome, everyone.

Sophie Forster: 

Hello.

Giulia Poerio: 

Hello.

Wendy Garnham: 

Sophie, could you start by telling us a little about your research and what drew you to this area?

Sophie Forster: 

Yeah. Sure. So I study attention. I tend to be particularly interested in understanding what’s going on in our brains when we do things like get distracted or, like, don’t notice things. What drew me to this area, I suppose, my sister was diagnosed with ADHD as a child, and I kind of saw how that really affected her at school. And, I always struggled a lot with attention as well. And it wasn’t really until I’d already been studying distraction and how impossible it is to pay attention, and, all of these problems, and publishing papers on ADHD that I realized that I also have the extremely heritable condition that my sister is diagnosed with. So, yeah, that was kind of how I got into it.

Wendy Garnham: 

And same question to you, Giulia.

Giulia Poerio: 

So I’ve studied lots of different things including sleep and I’ve done some research on attention or specifically daydreaming, mind wandering, similar to some of the work that Sophie’s done. My interest in sleep has kind of really been because I sleep quite poorly. And I noticed the effects that it has on things like, you know, cognitive function, emotions in particular, and, all of those sorts of things. So I recognize how kind of important it is for people’s well-being and it affects everything. And we spend a really long time doing it. So it’s really, really important. So I’ve recently started working on, a grant that looks at sleep, in depersonalization and derealization disorder, so symptoms of dissociation. So a lot of my work at the moment is focused on that.

Wendy Garnham: 

Not a problem that I’ve experienced yet not being able to sleep.

Heather Taylor: 

Giulia, how has your research shaped your approach to teaching and supporting students?

Giulia Poerio:

 I don’t know whether this is like I’m allowed to say this, but, I encourage students to—so I teach a module on sleep and mental health, for 2nd year psychology students. And, I encourage them to understand what their own individual sleep preferences are like, particularly around the timing of sleep. So if they’re a night owl or like a morning person. Most of us are tend towards evening type if we’re in adolescence. So I say to students, if you are an extreme evening type or you’re an evening type, don’t come to my lectures if they’re early in the morning. Catch up on, kind of re-recording when you want to. Because students coming in completely sleep deprived for a 2 hour lecture, at a time that is not suitable for their body, I personally think is a waste of their time.

Heather Taylor (03:30): 

I’ve heard about this. [Have you heard about this?] Yeah. From students. And I can’t remember who it was, actually. But you know what I mean. You’re sort of like if you’re going to be lecturing on this and saying how important it is to recognize what your sleep patterns are and when you’re most awake and alert and so on, then, yeah, they like it. Obviously, they like it. We should look at the attendance rate. So I actually reckon your attendance won’t be worse as a result of it. It might even be better. 

Giulia Poerio:

I mean, I have a problem with students being forced into going to lectures and the attendance thing anyway because, you know, a lot of students experience sensory problems. I experience a lot of sensory problems myself, and I would never be able to concentrate in a lecture ever. And so I think uni should be about understanding what your learning preferences and styles are and, you know, taking control of that and doing it that way. I mean, that’s probably not very popular with universities but that’s my personal view.

Heather Taylor: 

It’s popular with students. Yeah. 

Wendy Garnham:

As an extreme evening type, I wonder if I could use the same philosophy for meetings at 9 o’clock.

Giulia Poerio: 

Yes. One of my old supervisors, he had, delayed, sleep wake face disorder, which is extreme evening chronotype. I never saw him before 3 PM in the afternoon. And if I did, he’d done an all nighter, to be up in the morning. But, yeah, I tend to not have, morning meetings either.

Heather Taylor:

We were talking about that, but I’m like a super early person. Like, I’m, like, a 4 AM. 5 AM feels like a lie in, and I think and you’re right. I wasn’t like that when I was well, until I had to be, like, but I wasn’t like that when I was younger if I had the choice. So would it such a mismatch between me and them because I’d have them all in at 7 AM, you know, if I could. But I wouldn’t, obviously, because they’d all hate me and no-one would turn up and no-one would do any work. But, yeah, it’s tricky when you’re, like, got this do you know what I mean?

Giulia Poerio: 

Well, there is research on this. So there’s some research that looked at what the ideal times for university lectures would be based on undergraduate students’ chronotype. And they suggested that students should be waking up at some on average, considering all of them, the individual differences at 9, half 9, starting lectures anywhere between 11 and 1, and then going to bed at, like, half past 1 in the morning.

Heather Taylor:

Oh that’s fine. I’m awake in the middle of the day.

Giulia Poerio: 

Yeah. So but that would prevent if we did that, that would prevent students from being chronically sleep deprived.

Heather Taylor: 

So, same question to you then, Sophie. How has your research shaped your approach to teaching and supporting students?

Sophie Forster (06:02): 

So I think my research, because I study attention, I think I’m aware of, firstly, like, the massive impact on attention on learning , in terms of, like, like, just their studies where they followed even just children from the point they start school to the point they finish school. And, attention is 1 of the main things that predicts how well they’ll do, you know, if they attention age 5 will predict how well they’ll do age 17. Even when you control for other things like baseline maths and English, it just has such a huge impact, and it’s because it’s really the way that your brain is choosing what information goes in. And I think the second thing is there’s a bit of a misconception about attention that it’s, like, all down to the person. You know, we talk about things like people having an attention span or whatever, and this is like, oh, how long can you pay attention to? And that kind of puts too much pressure on the students, you know, that they’re just meant to pay attention to whatever we throw at them. And actually, that’s not how attention works. It’s like, it would be kind of rubbish if that was how it works. Because if you imagine, like, for example, let’s say you’re having, a picnic in the park, you know, and you’re talking to your friend, and you might feel like your friend is what you should be paying attention to. But at that moment, someone throws a ball and it comes towards your head. So if you had this amazing attention span, you’re getting hit in the head with a ball at that moment. Right? Yeah. It’s like your attention needs to have this reflexive element to react to things. So being distracted isn’t, like, a bad thing, it’s attention working properly. But what this means as teachers is it’s kind of our responsibility to engage the reflexive parts of attention. You know, it’s not just down to them, it’s down to us, so we have to, like, work for it. Does that make sense? Yeah. That was a Yeah.

Wendy Garnham: 

That sort of reminds me of active learning. Yeah. So trying to really, like, bring the students into that sort of hands on engagement experiential side of things maybe.

Heather Taylor: 

Yeah. And I think, yeah, I think I agree with you. I think it’s a bit transactional. Like, if I know that I’ve got a lecture that, say, I did last year and they didn’t seem that into it and, actually, a lot of the time, they’re not into it because I’m not into it. You know, like, if I’m not enthusiastic, they’re not going to be. So I have to figure out a way that I can get enthusiastic about it. I also have to think about, right, that was a bit heavy, that bit, so I’m going to have to chop it up with something else. You know, like, keep changing what we’re doing. And I and I’m quite easily bored, but I’m also quite easily, if I like something, I find it quite easy to stay with it, but if I don’t, I’ll just zone out. So I kind of feel like I do it based on whether I’m getting bored, you know, when I’m making it and when I’m writing it and when I’m delivering it. And it tends to work that way, but I think there is that, yeah, I agree with you. There’s a transaction. And, actually, I think if we just relied on it all being about the students’ ability to pay attention, no-one would really try and do anything good in their teaching. They just deliver. You don’t need a teacher then, actually. You could just give them a handout and go read that, and then you’ve got all the information. You know? So I like the idea that it’s a transaction, that we have to get there a tick. I don’t I mean, I don’t want to do like a TikTok and a dance and whatever. You know, I don’t I don’t want to go too far. 

Sophie Forster:

It doesn’t and it doesn’t like, it’s not like there’s only one way. I think, like, interactive stuff is a great way of getting people’s attention. If you’re really good at, sort of, telling anecdotes, or if you’re funny, or whatever it is, but something that’s a bit easier to attend to, right? And just being aware of those points and peppering them in, and sort of thinking about it in terms of, like, if you think about your lecture through the lens of, like, if it was a broadcast on TV and one bit of it just cut out, what would be the moments where if people miss that, they’re not going to understand anything else? You know? And if there’s moments like that, sort of being like, okay, I’ve got to really be like, okay, everyone? Even just sort of saying, okay, you re and I think that the other thing is not doing that. It’s ableist because, I mean, there’s huge individual differences in how much people can pay attention. And maybe some faculty are on the end of a spectrum that they find it easy so they don’t have this awareness. And it’s and they sort of think it’s about effort, you know, that if you’re I’ve heard people say, oh, a serious student won’t need, you know, it’s not really about effort. It’s just it’s individual differences. So, yeah. I think that’s my hot take. Being boring is ableist.

Heather Taylor (10:35): 

Yeah. That’s a yeah. That’s quite a good slogan.

Giulia Poerio: 

Yeah. Can I can I ask Sophie a question? Do you have thoughts on like how to re-engage people’s attention when they’re when they veered off? So like and how much of responsibility is that for students? So one of the things that I noticed that I can’t believe students do is try and write down everything I’m saying, and they’re paying almost too much attention. And then they miss something, and then they’ve gone off, and then they can’t get back in. Like, do you have thoughts on how I could improve that in my teaching?

Sophie Forster: 

Well, I Yeah. It’s difficult, isn’t it? But I I sort of think it’s okay if people in a lecture, I don’t know. For me, I sort of think the aim that people will take in a 100% is not realistic. So I tend to sort of repeat stuff that I think is like, I tend to give it multiple ways to go into that. Yeah. And again, it’s like it’s sort of like, what are the bits that are unmissable? What are the bits that if they don’t get that, they might as well have not been there? And sometimes I even resort to being like, if I’m really stuck, I’ll be like, okay, I’m really sorry. This next bit, I’ve tried really hard to think of a way that isn’t boring to explain it, and it is just really boring. And you are just going to want to tune out, But just let’s all just ramp up. Oh, that’s it. If you’ve got, like, you know, this much attention, use it all now. And then it’s why I’m because, I mean, I find that helpful Yeah.

Giulia Poerio: 

So you’re seeing when signposting to pay attention. Yeah. That’s really helpful, thank you. I’ll take those tips.

Heather Taylor (12:04): 

Yeah. Sometimes you do have to tell them this is going to be dry. And I Yeah. And it just is, but you need it. Yeah. Yeah.

You know what? Eleanor uses, Eleanor is someone else who works here. Eleanor uses, summary slides throughout her lectures. So if she’s going to talk about 3 or 4 different things within a lecture, at the end of each thing, she’ll summarize what she’s just said. So I think, I still haven’t applied that, actually, but I think that’s good for you know, when you say people get lost and they can get really stressed out if they get lost and then they’re zoned out and then they think, oh, why am I here? I need to know this to they don’t. And, also, they can watch you back later. But, anyway, I think the summary bits are like, oh, okay. I missed that bit. Or, oh, actually, I did understand the key bits I was meant to understand. So I think that’s another good way to do it. Yeah. 

Wendy Garnham:

I think just sort of setting expectations as well. Because I know in in mine, I tend to sort of put too much in sometimes, but I just tend to put the minimal amount on my slides. So, like, the main headings or the main sort of point. And then I tell them at the beginning, like, I’m going to talk to that point. I don’t expect you to get it all down, but they’re all recorded. So you can always go back and fill in details later. But we’ll be doing, like, interactive things during the lecture and that will give you a sort of a deeper understanding of what that key point means. But if you want the specific details, you’ve always got that recording then to go back to technology, permitting. But, that seems to work quite well as well. So they’re not taking down lots and lots of text from a slide but they’re taking down a main point then you do, like, a little sort of activity or you give an example or whatever. But because everything’s recorded, they’ve then got that backup to go to and that I think that seems to work well. I  used to put a lot on the slides and, yeah, it just you end up with students asking to go back to an earlier slide and it just disrupts the flow and 

Heather Taylor: 

They also all seem to have this idea that would they need to take notes. They’ll go, you know, come and see you – I can’t take notes in the lecture and keep up. Don’t then. No-one said you had to. It’s not necessary to embed information, in fact.

And you might remember things on a bit of a deeper level if you just pay attention at the time. You could scribble some notes down afterwards if you want. Some of them might not need to. I appreciate people don’t want to double up on everything, so they don’t want to sit in a 2 hour lecture and then do 2 hours worth of note taking, but they can’t do it at the same time. If they’re telling you they can’t do it, don’t do it then.  Why’d you keep trying to do it? [I never did it]. I didn’t. No. Yeah. I used to watch him back and go the odd thing. You know what I mean? Write the odd thing down. Also, they can watch me I tell them because they do it anyway. They can watch you at double speed afterwards.

Giulia Poerio: 

Oh, yeah. I tell them that. I’m like, slow me down, speed me up. Like, you know So they can pause me.

Heather Taylor: 

Exactly. So they can just watch it, and then the bits that they didn’t really get, they can go back to afterwards, you know? So, yeah, maybe that’s the expectation we need to tell them. They’re like, you all think you have to take notes. No-one said you had to take notes.

Sophie Forster: 

Because they also yeah. I always get students complaining that I don’t have enough text on my slides. But then it’s because I mean, it’s literally impossible to listen to somebody talking and read text that is different words. 

Heather Taylor:

Like, that’s just that’s not want you to say the same words, but that is the least engaging  yeah. They don’t really want that. Yeah. 

Wendy Garnham: 

Well, then if you did that, they’d then complain that you were just reading slides.

Sophie Forster (15:35): 

Well, so I have that exact problem, which is that I deliberately put loads of text on my slides so that they don’t have to write down everything I’m saying because all the core information is on the slide, and some of them don’t. I’m like, why are you writing down what I’m saying? Because it’s literally already there. I think that you can’t win because everybody’s so individual in their learning. But what you can try and do is accommodate stuff. So next year, for example, I’m moving all the text from the slides to the notes section.

You know, and that was a suggestion made by one of the students, which I really liked. But I really struggled to know what the optimal thing is. And maybe there is no optimal. 

Giulia Poerio: 

I agree it’s about maybe the students’ expectations though. Because you wouldn’t just watch a film and then be, like, writing down. Oh, the camera pans to a scene of someone opening a door and somebody comes through the door. You know? Like, you wouldn’t get much out of that film, would you?

Wendy Garnham: 

That brings us to our next question. And I’m going to ask you, Giulia, for this one first. What is one key insight from your research that you think could improve the student experience in higher education?

Giulia Poerio: 

I guess everybody’s really different. And the key challenge for individuals is to learn about themselves and self discover whatever that might be, and learn what makes you, and what you like and what you don’t like. And don’t feel like you have to do things that society or the university or other people expect from you if that doesn’t fit with who you feel you are.

Sophie Forster: 

I think an insight maybe from the field of mind wandering, which is also, an area I work in, is just that, like, there’s lots of studies of mind wandering in lectures. And from those studies, it’s fairly established that a lot of your students aren’t listening. If you just look at the amount of time people spend mind wandering, especially as time goes on, I think by the end it’s going to be more than 50% of the time, right? It’s like a lot. It’s not it’s not we’re not missing a little amount, so you just have to be giving a lecture in that knowledge. A lot of the signal is getting lost. So that’s yeah. Stuff needs to be repeated. Stuff needs to be flagged.

Heather Taylor: 

A common, like, annoyance for me is that someone asks me a question via email that I’ve said a million times in a million different ways. Right? But and then it what also annoys me is other students are going, why’d you keep saying that? You  know? Yeah. But you’re right. I think that, we can’t just assume they’ve taken also, sometimes, they’re just really anxious as well. You know, even coming into a big lecture theatre, they’re just really anxious sometimes. Some of the students are in a seminar room. They’ve got a lot going on And, you know yeah. I don’t know. I think I don’t know. That’s an important thing for me to remember. 

I think also this is unrelated to what we’re talking about now. But you know when you say you let your students attend if they want to or not? [Which is technically not allowed], but Yeah. I get last time, I got so personally offended by the lack of attendance towards the end of term. And I normally don’t. Right? But it really, like because I think they forget that you’re a person. Right? And I’m a person who’s prepared something. I’m standing up in front of a very big room with not many people in it saying it, and, you know, like, it damages my self esteem. You know? It didn’t used to. It’s just this term, for some reason, it wound me up. But I think, again and I did keep reminding myself of this even. Like, it’s not about me. It’s about them. My feedback from my module was fantastic. Right? So that cheered me up, you know, once I got to that bit. So I love them all again now. But, yeah, I think it is really important to remember both of your points anyway. You know, you’re about again, about you focusing on it being about them getting to know them and you about saying they’re not going to necessarily remember or pay attention to everything we say. I think it is really important, at least for me, but maybe I’m just overly sensitive, to remember that it’s not about me. It’s not about me at all.

Giulia Poerio (19:46): 

Yeah. I would rather students look after their own well-being than come to my lecture,

and when it’s deadline season. Like, why bother coming to a lecture if you know you’re not going to be able to concentrate because you’re worrying about something else or your mind wondering about your other concerns.  So just go, I’ll catch up on that lecture later. And now, which I didn’t have when I was at uni, everything’s recorded. So fantastic. Like, why put yourself through that if you don’t have to?

Heather Taylor: 

Yeah. I suppose there always needs to be – to differentiate though between people that are doing it because they’re prioritizing certain needs and they are doing the work lately. I know we’ve got students like that who don’t always attend everything, but they always have watched it or read it or whatever it is before the next session. They come full of questions, you know. But we get other people and we might assume that they’re doing that, but they’ve actually just dropped off. Like, they’ve disengaged for the whole term. And so it’s a really it’s almost like a really tricky thing to know when you need to intervene with someone. I mean, we have the, obviously, attendance policies and so on in place, but sometimes you’re intervening and there’s not a reason you really need to intervene. They’re managing. But, actually, I think in a lot of cases, they’re not, You know? And something needs to happen. And it’s a tricky thing. I really like it in your module because I think it’s speaking to what you believe in and what you’re lecturing on. I feel like I don’t know if it would work across the board. You know? It would make me super popular with students though.

Sophie Forster: 

But do you not think that, like, it’s a university is also about becoming an independent person and if you decide you don’t want to go to lectures. It’s not school. We’re not in school anymore.

Heather Taylor: 

No. No. I do agree with you in that. But I think as well, 18 is, like I know technically they’re an adult, but 18 is I didn’t, you know, I’m 41 now. I’m much more adult now than I was when I was 18, say, so there’s stages of adulthood. But, also, I do agree with you with that, but I think sometimes a lot of other things are going on. And if we just or if I, at least in my experience, just let it all slide, I’d be missing lots of people that actually needed support and needed me to reach out and go, why are you never here? 

Sophie Forster

Do you do that, do you look at people’s attendance rates and then you can see whether they’re, like, engaging on Canvas, and then you contact them?

Heather Taylor: 

Yeah.

Heather Taylor: 

We have a smaller cohort. 

Sophie Forster

So I was going to say, like, how does is that something as convenors we should be doing? 

Heather Taylor: 

I wouldn’t with the size of groups.  Oh, go on Simon

Simon Overton (22:13): 

I know the answer  to this.

Yeah. This is, producer Simon. So this comes out of a really unfortunate case and I forget which university was it? Bristol or Manchester, where a student, had not been attending and hadn’t been noted. So as coordinators, what we do, during term time, we, every 2 weeks, we get a little report of people that have been absent, and we send them an email, but it’s kind of a it’s not a horrible email. But it’s very it’s very sort of officious sounding. So we send that to them. But what I do is I leave it a few days and then I will send them a personal email and just say like, how’s your studying going? You know, are you alright? And I find that that gets much better responses. But I think that’s kind of that for me, that’s, a reason to be concerned about attendance and to make sure that people are coming along. And again, because they are such young adults or be adults, I think sometimes they do need a bit of extra looking after because it might be the first time for them.

Sophie Forster: 

 I wonder whether attend attendance versus engagement is a different thing. So if you’re engaging online on Canvas, and you can see that they’re watching the lecture recordings or their engagement is high and their attendance is low.

Giulia Poerio: 

I usually so I have a final year module that is smaller. Right? So it will have, like, 60 max on it. And so for that, it’s more feasible, and I guess I do establish more of a rapport with my students. And, I do usually, especially in the early weeks, I will check who hasn’t shown up and kind of check-in on them and email them. Because and quite often, when I email them, it will turn out that it’s an issue. And sometimes me reaching out actually is what encourages them to, it kind of almost helps them a bit because they’re sort of like, okay. Somebody cares and is checking in on me. So I think it can, you know, I do it in a nice way. I’m not like, where are you? It’s more like I’m just making sure everything’s okay. You know? And do you need any help to come back?

Wendy Garnham: 

That’s one of the underpinnings of the doughnut model that we use in Foundation Year is the idea that we have to reach out rather than them sort of coming and telling us. But I think also there’s a sort of another issue for me which is just the ones who attend a lot seem to have the strongest friendship groups. And I think those who don’t attend tend to drift on the outskirts of the friendship groups, and they’re often the ones that report feeling quite isolated, quite lonely. So I think sometimes attendance, if you view it in a different way as being, you know, you’re sort of getting to know people, you’re using it as an opportunity to network with people on your module. I mean, obviously, there are there are barriers for some to do in that, but at least it sort of gets that expectation that you’re all in it together. You’re all here to sort of, you know, take what you can from a teaching session. But that’s sort of one of the other reasons why we sort of we monitor attendance is just and do that reach out. You know, you’ve your attendance has dropped quite significantly. I suppose a bit like you were saying, Simon, just, you know, is everything okay? Don’t forget there’s loads of support. Just, you know, let us know. And we use the 1 to 9 system, so we just get students every 3rd week to send your academic adviser a number between 1 and 9, and anything below a 5 they’ll get back to you, they’ll arrange to meet with you, we can see what’s happening. And that the  uptake in terms of students responding has been fantastic. And it just, you know, they don’t have to explain anything. They don’t have to go into detail. They don’t have to put anything in an email. They can just send you a number. And that can then just trigger the whole sort of sequence of support.

Heather Taylor (26:10): 

I do think it is still worth weighing up with. We’re saying we’re reaching out to them for their well-being, we want them to attend for their well-being. But research would suggest that their well-being is being impacted by us getting them to attend things without them having sufficient sleep. They’ll probably get more stress as well if they can’t attend, like, as in paying attention because also because they haven’t had sufficient sleep. So it’s really tricky to balance because we can’t have every student learn between 11 and 1. We struggle to fit them in between 9 and 8.

Giulia Poerio: 

No, starting between 11 and 1. So you start

Heather Taylor:

Oh, starting.  But still it’s hard in this. Do you know what I mean?

Giulia Poerio:

 Practically, it’s not feasible.

Heather Taylor: 

Yeah. But, you know, if we were if we so we’re sort of like reaching out, trying to look after their well-being for things that’s already happened. You’re actually trying to stop things from happening. You’re trying to stop their well-being from deteriorating. So it’s a really tricky balance.

Wendy Garnham:

Yeah. But it probably does. I’m just thinking, like, in terms of, when I used to teach in secondary schools and there it’s like an extreme where they have to be in school at, like, 20 to 9 in the morning and, like, the number of sleep deprived children coming into school is ridiculous. So, yeah, it’s sort of I think the whole education system needs to 

Giulia Poerio: 

And actually society because most people don’t fit 9 to 5 either. You’re really lucky because society is, biased towards morning, really early morning types.

Heather Taylor:

I know people think that morning people are really good. 

Giulia Poerio: 

No. But they do think they do think evening people are lazy. People think you’re lazy if you’re an evening.

Heather Taylor: 

Yeah. But I’ll stop by 4, you know? Like, that’s a long that would have been a long day, though. I don’t have  to go into 4.

Giulia Poerio: 

But you’re definitely working. You’re definitely working that out, like, the hours that people would expect you to be working.

Heather Taylor: 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s the thing. I think if they get an email from me at 6 in the morning, they’re like, wow. Heather’s so on it. But you’re not going to get an email from me at 6 o’clock at night, but most of you probably do send emails at 6 o’clock at night.

Simon Overton (27:59):

So in my normal role as coordinator in in Global Studies, we’ve been reviewing the courses for the year in Anthropology and in International Development. And in both of those meetings with mostly different sets of, faculty members, it’s gone to the same thing. Now, obviously, we talk about AI because we always talk about that. But it’s very much gone back to attendance and engagement, and how that drops off. And a lot of people feel, a lot of the lecturers feel that, that the timing of their lectures is really important. And everybody’s after certain sort of times. And a lot of them have tied together the time of the lecture with the, attendance overall. It’s just funny for me. It’s really it’s come up so many times. One thing that was quite interesting for me was that, students who live off campus and are expected to come in even for 10 o’clock, they’re paying a higher price for getting on the same bus, which I had not really thought about as well, which can be really, really tough for them. The other thing that we struggle with a lot, and we try to avoid it through timetabling, is when you have a sort of a split shift. So you have a lecture in the morning and then nothing for 5 hours. And then something else in the evening. And we can sort of mitigate that by switching around, seminar times and things. So I suppose my question is, how much do you feel that there is a correlation between engagement and the time that sessions take place?

Giulia Poerio: 

Sounds like an empirical question to me. I don’t know because I teach at the same time, every week. So personally, I can’t speak to it in in terms of whether I’ve noticed that I taught 11 till 1, which I think was quite a good slot, for attendance. But I would imagine that they would be, you know, very early and very late, I think, is difficult. But I don’t have data on it, so I can’t 

Heather Taylor: 

You should look at that.

Giulia Poerio: 

It’s an empirical question, isn’t it?

Sophie Forster: 

I’ve had different lecture slots and it for sure makes a difference. I mean, but you just it’s you teach a bit differently if you’re but the it’s just like, for example, if it’s in the morning, a lot more people are going to be using caffeine. Do you know what I mean? So it’s like, it just, and it’s, and if it’s the end of the day, people are just going to be a bit tired, you know, mostly, and, or I’m going to be tired also. Like, it just, but so I think it for sure. And it’s also just, like, if it’s really early, like, I think I had 9, you’ll have people not show up and you’ll even I don’t know. It’s just it’s yeah. It for sure makes a difference.

Heather Taylor: 

Yeah. Thursday mornings are a nightmare as well because it’s a big student night on a Wednesday that doesn’t finish till, like, 4 AM. And so, and I’ve had students come to 9 AMs from straight from there. Yeah.

Giulia Poerio: 

Well, that’s dedication.

Heather Taylor: 

It’s kind of not nice because of this smell of alcohol at that time in the morning. But, yeah, that is dedication. Yeah.  

Sophie Forster: 

That’s definitely what I did when I was. Yeah. So stupid. I literally never don’t know why I went. Yeah. I would always show up, and it never occurred to me that, you know, I might as well not be there.

I think this is the thing as well students are so anxious about the attendance policy. If they don’t, if the pin didn’t work, I’ll get a million emails saying, oh, the pin didn’t work. You know? All of this and, you know, they’re there. They’re engaging. So 

Giulia Poerio: 

You know something that Wendy was saying earlier though that I was thinking, it reminded me of, so I think some I’m skipping it well. Something that because it took – I was always really aware of the need to get my students’ attention and to get them to engage, but it’s easier said than done. Right? And I tried to have lots of interactive activities, but it did take a really long time to get them to be working. Like I think for quite a while, they were a bit chaotic and sort of, you know, people roaming around the room aimlessly and, you know, and I think for me, a real turning point was actually pandemic in 2020 because we had to suddenly, we got told last minute we will have to do it all on Zoom. And so I just was, well, you know, if I’m giving a lecture on Zoom, this is like, no. Like, I might as well just record it. So I decided to just record all my lectures and then use all of the lecture slot for kind of a fairly, like, free flow interactive thing , but with a bit more room to experiment. And it really helped me to establish a rapport with the students because it was like I kind of I got to know them a bit more. And I think what I learned in that term was, the things that worked the most were exactly as you said, the things that get them to make friends. You know? And I had feedback, at the end that somebody said, like, oh, you know, I didn’t expect to make new friends in the final year, but I did. And like, we made a really good new friendship group on this module. And like, I was like, really pleased. I was like, that’s a reason to attend, right? Like, if it’s fun, if you get to meet people and if you’re given activities that allow you to kind of that’s just a way of, like, building in a reward to attending, like, making it sort of rewarding. You know?

Sophie Forster: 

Yeah. I think but then you’re doing the attendance not for the academic outcome, for the social outcomes, which actually I think are probably go together though.

Yeah. We do go together. They for sure do. Because, I mean, reward is, like, a really, powerful way of engaging attention. So if you can, like, leverage social rewards to get people to be there, and then they’re going to talk about the content. And maybe if they’ve all been mind wandering at slightly different moments, they’ll be afterwards, like, oh, what was that bit about that? You know? Yeah. And so they just it it’s really helpful to them, I think, to 

Wendy Garnham: 

I think it also sort of values their individual opinions and sort of perspectives as well because we can sort of deliver information to them. But just getting them to think about the theme or the topic that you’re covering and feedback can be really powerful.

 I know one of the things that I tried this, last term was, getting students to do a little activity in I think it was the 2nd lecture, and they had to sort of put their ideas and experiences on a little card. So we were learning about the self and I just I hadn’t really sort of intended it to have the effect it had but I just said, you know, just for now I want you to just write a little paragraph which is all about you. Just, you know, I’m going to ask you to do this and put it into practice and then we use that as a sort of starting point for the lecture. But what I did after, I thought, well, actually I’m just going to go through and I’m going to email each of the students and just respond to what they’ve put in there. And, like, the feedback I had was just incredible, like, the students saying I feel heard, you know, I didn’t expect you to email everyone. That was really nice, you know. Thank you so much. Yeah. And it was just, wow, so I’m going to do that now. Every time I’m going to start the same thing. 

But it just I think the little things can be really, really powerful. I don’t think it has to be about, you know, creating, you know, hugely complicated activities or it can be something really quick. Like, we did that in, like, 5 minutes. It took me a long time to email them all but anyway, but it was worth it because then I felt like I’d sort of got that connection with the students. Like, they knew that we were doing things because they sort of mattered or because, you know, I wasn’t just doing it to tick a box. It’s like I really was interested in in what they had to say and I think that that also is another way to sort of try and engage their attention is like, we’re interested in what you’ve got to say or interested in your perspective, your experience rather than I’m just going to tell you what the textbook says or, you know, I’m just going to sort of show you my slides and off you go, see you later. It’s about that sort of I guess that connection, social connection.

Sophie Forster (36:18): 

Yeah. And there’s a lot of evidence to support that just making something self relevant in some way is just tags it as being intentionally important in a really basic way. It’s not like you decide to pay attention. It’s that your brain will just prioritize it. You know, even when they do really sort of contrived experiments where they’re like, learn that this circle is you, this triangle is your friend, and this square is a stranger. And then, like, I say, contrast. I think this is a line of research by somebody else that I very much admire, but I mean very simple. Right? And just by learning these connections, people will attend more to the circle just because you’ve been told the circle is you. And in terms of, like, the brain regions that are usually, involved in your attention being drawn to, like, brightly coloured things or, you know, they’ll have the same effect just from being tagged as being. So this establishing a rapport is actually it’s like doing something that helps you to helps your brain to focus, you know? It’s not just about 

Giulia Poerio: 

It’s so hard to think about how to do that in a large group teaching situation, I think, though, because I mean, I have tried to do things like that where I get them to complete measures and then they put on Poll Everywhere their scores, and we can talk about the group as a whole. But to do something individual for upwards of a 150 students, I would love to be able to do something like that. I just don’t, I mean, it’s not feasible, practically, especially with increasing student numbers that you know, so it’s not too bad a lot 

Wendy Garnham: 

My realization, because I had a 155 students, and I thought it would just be a very quick. Obviously, they weren’t all there for the lectures. It wasn’t quite that many I had to respond to, but it didn’t make me realize, like, what I’d started. And then, of course, once you started, you feel you’ve got to finish. So, yeah, it wasn’t a quick process, but I just persevered with it. And, yeah, that just the reward back was massive and just the engagement because I suppose it just be being right at the beginning. I’m not sure if it would have worked as well if I’d done it further down the line, but having that buy in at the beginning and sort of showing that, you know, we do really care about what they’re bringing to the table, that just sort of set the baseline in a way. But, but, yeah, it did. As Heather will attest, as I sat in the office typing many an email.

Heather Taylor: 

Yeah. Yeah. I do remember that. Yeah.

Sophie Forster: 

Another way though I mean, accessing self relevance as a way of getting attention, it can be as simple as just examples you use, you know? And like, if you, you know, if obviously interactive stuff is like almost the peak of like, get, but I mean, even just if you get if you’re saying something and you give an example, giving an example that’s likely to be relevant to the people you’re talking to is probably going to be understood. But then it gets tricky because then you’re like, is it going to be more relevant for some students than others? You know? Is this going to be like and are these sort of benefits going to be, you know, only for sort of the students that are in the most sort of common demographic? And am I really capturing everybody? So then you have to give, like, a variety. It’s hard. 

Heather Taylor: 

I think that with that with the relevance thing, they actually quite enjoy it if you make it relevant to you. So, you know, you’re saying about the anecdotes. I’ve got, it’s always by accident, but I’ll do an anecdote. Right? And I’ve got and I’d and I’d never really thought about it that much, but this year especially, I think I went off on one a bit with the anecdotes. Right? And I’ve got lots of really good written student feedback about the anecdotes, helping them understand and so on. But I think it probably does help them understand, but I think, again, it’s that rapport building. So they’re, I don’t know. I think every year I’m a lecturer, you know, like the 1st year I was a lecturer, so I’ve got to be like a lecturer, Right? Which isn’t me, you know? And, like, try and pronounce my words a bit better and you know what I mean? Wear a shirt. Right? And then as it’s gone on, I’ve just got less and less interested in what I’m meant to be and just being more me. And I do feel that every year, the rapport I build with the students gets better as a result of this, and it breaks down the hierarchies and so on. So I think it doesn’t always have to be relevant to them. They do like a bit of stuff that’s relevant to them. Right? They do like to discuss themselves. Everybody does. But well, not everybody. A lot of people do. But if you can connect with them in some way by telling them some silly little story about you, that also that is engagement. That is interaction.. They will laugh or they’ll go, oh, you or whatever. You know? And then you’ve had a conversation more than a lecture. And I think that’s, yeah. That really works as well. Definitely. Yeah.

Sophie, can you share an example of a change you’ve made in your teaching or practice as a result of your research? What was the impact on your students?

Sophie Forster (41:13):

 Any moment where I’m losing my students’ attention, I’m not teaching them.  Like this is how I see it, you know? And that’s not to say I have to like beat myself up because I’m going to lose their attention repeatedly. I mean, I’m sure my students spend half of my lectures not paying attention to me. Right? I’m not saying I’m this amazing attention getter, but it’s, I guess yeah. So it’s just like I try really, really hard. I try, I try to always. I try to think about how long in between things that might be a bit more engaging, you know, there is. And yeah. And I think the interactive stuff and it’s, I think the biggest thing was just giving them, seeing the benefit of, interactive stuff that actually allows them to connect with theirpeers was something that I was surprised by. I hadn’t quite realized, so 

Giulia Poerio:

 Probably not related to the sleep research that I’ve done, but I was initially an emotion researcher. So I think that feeling is like the most is more important than thinking in many ways and influences our thinking. So I think the things that I try and do is are to influence – not manipulate – but, try and get emotional reactions from students. And so that they don’t they don’t get bored, I think, is the key thing. So I’ll, do things like I will only talk at them for a certain period of time. And then I spend ages finding video clips, YouTube clips, things like that to show them that’s much more, like, it creates, like, an emotive reaction. Like, it might be a sad news story or it might be something from a court case. Or I’ll create materials that are, like, kind of quite fun and illustrate a concept of something. Like, for example, we looked at, the parasomnia defence which is this idea of can you kill somebody in your sleep and they had two case reports and they had to do things. So, what I’m always trying to do is make people’s emotions a bit more variable throughout the time that I’m with them to try and keep them going.

Heather Taylor: 

This has been the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex created by Sarah Watson, Wendy Garnham, and Heather Taylor, and produced by Simon Overton. For more episodes as well as articles, blogs, case studies, and infographics, please visit Podcast | Learning Matters

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Episode 10: Transformative Learning

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The Learning Matters Podcast captures insights into, experiences of, and conversations around education at the University of Sussex. The podcast is hosted by Prof Wendy Garnham and Dr Heather Taylor. It is recorded monthly, and each month is centred around a particular theme. The theme of our tenth episode is ‘transformative learning’ and we hear from Dr Adhip Rawal, Assistant Professor in Psychology in the School of Psychology, and Chris Stocking, Lecturer in English Language in the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities. 

Recording

Listen to the recording of Episode 10 on Spotify.

Transcript

Wendy Garnham:

Welcome to the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex, where we capture insights, experiences, and conversations around education at our institution and beyond. Our theme for this episode is Transformative Learning, and our guests are Dr Adhip Rawal, assistant professor in psychology in the School of Psychology, and Chris Stocking, lecturer in English language in the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities. Our names are Wendy Garnham and Heather Taylor, and we are your presenters today. Welcome, everyone.

All:

Hello.

Heather Taylor:

Can you give us an idea of the kinds of discussions you’ve been having around transformative learning and what that means to you? 

Chris Stocking:

So the discussions that we’ve been having, they go back a good few months. Adhip and I, we sort of became aware of each other’s work after we won the Education and Innovation awards for our respective projects. And Adhip’s, if I remember, was on stories from the heart, who we are, what we are, and it really resonated with me in some research that I’ve been doing. So I had a look at Adhip’s profile and found a paper that he’d recently written, called Deep Calling, the Will of the Heart. And reading through this, I realized that I had found a very kindred spirit here at the university that was thinking about knowledge and understanding and learning through very different perspectives using different concepts. So I reached out to him, and we met, and we began discussions. And I think at that stage, we hadn’t called it transformative learning at all. This is something that we’ve kind of given it this name at this stage, just as something that we can start to build around.

Adhip Rawal:

And I think there was something, so we didn’t use those words, transformative learning, and we haven’t used those words yet. I think the words that we were using were sort of being and belonging because they spoke to the respective strands of the work we’re engaged in. And I kind of felt when Chris messaged me and I found out about his work that these were sort of two strands that ought to find each other. You know, just like people have to kind of find each other to do something creative, it also seems to me that there are certain themes that have to find each other. So this connection between the themes of being and belonging seemed very important to me. And I think one aspect of that is, and that relates, I think, to what transformative learning means to me, is that we kind of make an invitation to each other to be closer than people have ever perhaps been in academia. So we make this invitation to each other, “let us be closer to each other”. And in this atmosphere of closeness, something will be generated that could potentially be transformative.

Heather Taylor (03:12):

By closeness, do you mean sort of in my mind, I’m thinking of sort of closeness in terms of sharing, maybe without barriers or without sort of a little bit of personal pretence, you know, which there can definitely be in academia. I think students as well can be concerned sometimes about oversharing, you know. So by closeness, do you mean this sort of sharing of experiences or sharing of thoughts? 

Adhip Rawal:

I think what I’m speaking about is sharing at a level of being that don’t necessarily come into contact with each other anymore. So Chris spoke about this paper that I wrote, Deep Calling, the Will of the Heart, so I think what we’re speaking to really is that we kind of now need to make an invitation to reinstate a very old channel of human communication, which is a heartfelt connection. And that heartfelt connection, that heartfelt way of speaking to one another and orienting to the world, can somehow be regenerative. So I’m saying that a person can begin to recover certain things that they ought to know about themselves and that they ought to be doing in the world.

Heather Taylor:

Like a sort of… a reawakening from having these connections? 

Adhip Rawal:

So that’s exactly it. So I think that’s the beauty of the connection because we have stopped including the heart, I think, in how we work and how we speak and what we do in academia, and now it’s lying asleep. It needs some form of impulse to start awakening again, speaking again.

Chris Stocking:

Yeah. So I mean, it’s interesting, you know, when I’m speaking with Adhip, and the words, the language that he uses, this idea of being, because a lot of the work that I do is looking at 

becoming. And so the way that I frame and understand these discussions and this proximity, this closeness that we’re engaged in is through kind of this collaborative becoming. It’s kind of leaning into these unexpected avenues of thinking, of discussing, being vulnerable enough to respond, to stumble in discussion, and to find sort of the edges of one another and to start to sort of, say, dream beyond those. So there’s a lot of different kind of epistemic framings that we’re engaged in, this discussion, this idea of the heart, of dreaming, of dancing. I think when we start to use different terminology, and this is what we’re engaged in, this is what we’re practicing, this is what we’re allowing ourselves to investigate and stumble and feel our way into, we start using these different concepts or terms to talk about learning and this experience of listening and speaking and thinking and feeling from the heart, the soul, the spirit, it allows us to start thinking about learning in different terms, different ways. And for me, there’s something very generative and creative and earnest in this. It doesn’t need to fit back into a certain research paradigm or a certain disciplinary framing. It’s indisciplinary in that sense, so we’re drawing on a lot of different concepts. We’re investigating teaching in very different ways, Adhip, through his work within psychology, and my own with interculturality and these intercultural spaces, which are very dynamic, rich, fixed, and tender spaces. There’s a lot of contestation and negotiation that is required. There’s a lot of care that is required. And it’s something that I notice a lot when I speak with students that I teach is one thing that they continuously say is that they felt it was a space in which they were cared for. And that, I think, is very important. So in this extension, this invitation that Adhip has offered by thinking about the heart, there is within that an invitation for thinking about how we care within the university and ways that we frame discourses around students who are people with sometimes very complex lives and how we acknowledge that and talk differently about the people who are here at the university.

Wendy Garnham (07:48):

It sort of raises two things for me. One is that sense of personalization, which it seems to be much more about the individual and directing the learning to that individual. But also, I wondered if you sort of thought about how this relates to the sort of the whole idea of 

risk taking and learning, because it sort of feels a bit more like it’s like that sort of caring, supportive context within which you can take risks, and you can stumble, and you can make errors, but that is how learning is most effective, I guess, in some ways. So I don’t know if that is sort of a true reflection of what you were thinking with that.

Adhip Rawal:

Yeah. I think it’s a very, very nice reflection, actually, a very nice question. Because I think what you’re speaking to there really is something very, very important that there’s a kind of a recognition or at least a possibility that what the individual has to say is important and could be of profound significance. Maybe they have something to say that has never been said in the world and could never be said without this person speaking it. So I think that sort of openness to that possibility that is very, very important to be open to who is this person in front of me and to pay attention to the more subtle realities of this person, has a huge possible reward. The risk that I take could come at the reward that I begin to speak myself into the world.

Chris Stocking:

There aren’t neat ways that we can evaluate or judge this. And I think, you know, similar to this discussion that’s taking place right now, there is this sense that we are 

co-creating meaning together, that we’re sensing one another, and that there is this risk of saying things that perhaps don’t transmit. It’s a discussion that Adhip and I actually had before coming to take part in this podcast of how can we ensure that what it is that we’re saying is transmissible because we’ve had these discussions. We’re coming from, there’s an implicit understanding that we have and an acceptance towards one another to speak in these ways. And so how do we invite within our learning spaces these kinds of discussions and this kind of speaking to emerge and for the people in these spaces to find that sense of caring towards another person so that they can take these risks, that they can be vulnerable, that they can open up, and that they can share. And then how does this link back into disciplinary frameworks, institutional frameworks, the learning that takes place in the university and the constraints that come with that? Because, you know, what we’re talking about here, I don’t think it’s something that lends itself necessarily to the kind of evaluated knowledge production that takes place at a university. where we’re looking at starting a program, a module, being guided through that of taking on this knowledge and then shunning that we understand this knowledge and that we can be creative and critical with it. But if we haven’t had a space to authentically start speaking from our own sense of being and that becoming that happens when you do start speaking with somebody else, that’s it’s very difficult to start. Where do you start with them? These are the kinds of discussions that we’ve been having. It’s one of the reasons why this idea of transformative learning, I suppose, this the name that we’ve given at this stage, it’s something that we still we don’t really have a neat definition for because we’re still talking through all of the other ways that learning could be taking place in university, all the other ways that we could be, showing care towards the people who are here and the learning and what it means to them. 

It reminds me a little bit of, a journal that I know that Sarah (Watson) has been involved in, POESIS, which is the creative act of knowledge. And she’s been writing about how when we’re in a lecture, when we’re in a seminar, from our perspective as educators, we’re using words in a way that we feel is transparent. We feel that the words are stable and that when we use them, they’re transmitted across and that whoever’s listening receives the words and understands them in the same way that we’re presenting them. But there’s disconnections all through there. There’s disconnections that come from learning the words, from performing the act of being a student, of being in a lecture, performing the act of listening to take notes. These are all very different ways of listening and being and becoming with somebody else that have been taking place with the conversations that Adhip and I have been having, which has been I think I use this term perform, this kind of collaborative becoming. In that a call is put out, it’s received and responded. And so we’re kind of creating knowledge in this way that takes us into strange territories. So I think it’s trying to understand how all of these processes, what it is that we’re talking about, how that can then extend into the university to challenge it, to give different spaces of learning and being and becoming.

Wendy Garnham (13:45):

So it sounds as though I mean, that really gives us an idea of at least some of the challenges. Are there any other sort of challenges in terms of actually getting transformative learning happening?

Adhip Rawal:

So, I mean, I think if I speak to that from experience, then I think one of the challenges that is involved in that is that, you know, what you’re trying to really do there is you’re trying to present the possibility that what we do in a classroom needs to be fundamentally different to what we do in daily life. Because you may have this kind of assumption that what we draw on from daily life is not enough for us to transform ourselves. So we have to do something different. Something different has to be in the classroom, operate in the classroom to allow that from happening. And of course that requires you to be free fundamentally to do those things. There’s an inherent, I think, obligation to suspend what might be expected of you and to do things differently if you really believe that something like you were speaking to this POESIS, which is really based on the idea that there’s something absent that my speaking can make present. Now that, you know, is fundamentally, I think what we’re talking about. Right? That, we need to be so be really aware of the relational responsibility that we have towards each other. That my speaking can be an act of your becoming. And I think so that of course, I mean I think so the point I want to make so sometimes, you know, colleagues say to me or students say to me, Adhip, why are we doing this again? This is going nowhere. And you have to, I think, have the courage to say, I understand that, but let’s go there again. Let’s go again to nowhere. Because I think that’s fundamentally what is involved. Right? All the other places we’ve been to already.

Chris Stocking (15:47)

Yeah. And I think other challenges Adhip was talking about there, what we’re doing in daily life, the impositions that we’re facing through daily life in, you know, our modern world and the – without sort of getting too much into politics and but there was framings of higher education that exist today that exert an enormous pressure over students, the way that they internalize this sense of going into debt to get an education, but the reward there linking them to a job, something in the future. But how all of this is couched in neoliberal ideology and terminology and the pressures and that kind of flattening out of identity into something which is quite, well, one dimensional in that sense. So when we engage in these kinds of discussions, Adhip and I have been having, we recognize the value of these discussions as opening up space for a different kind of being together and collaborative becoming and construction of knowledge and thinking, the way that we experience the world, the relational encounter with one another, and how that spills out into the way that we encounter other people, other members of the university, the students who are here at the university, the family. There is this an extension there which is challenging these implications of living in the modern world. 

But it’s one of the issues that comes from that is thinking about the value that students perceive from having these kinds of discussions, engaging with this kind of thinking and being together, and whether they can see value in that knowing that there is debt being incurred to get the education and that the education is a pathway to get a job to meet the material needs of the future. And I think that pathway has a lot of implications for how we experience learning, how we experience teaching, and how particularly the learners understand what’s happening at the university. And so it’s a question also that that comes to my mind is where do these kinds of spaces that we’ve been discussing exist today in higher education and education in general? Because I certainly can’t remember any point in my education having these kinds of discussions that we’re having today. And they are for me, they’re such an important part of the life that I have here at the university. To have found somebody like Adhip and to have these conversations, it allows me to reengage with the university, to reevaluate what it is that I’m doing, to perceive the people here at the university differently and otherwise, and so to create different relations with them. And so it’s that question again that it comes back to how can we frame this kind of learning in a way that is valuable to students, there are other constraints and pressures on them to go through university and the learning and what learning means?

Wendy Garnham (19:26):

It sounds as though relationships are really at the heart of it, sort of relating to each other. So I think that’s one of the key takeaways, I think. 

Heather Taylor:

Yeah. I think as well, you know I mean, you sort of inferred this at different points, but it is a bit of a tricky situation where you’re talking about something quite deep and maybe, like an organic kind of thing. And when you look at, like, marking criterias and learning outcomes, it’s all very intellectualized, and it’s kind of hard, I guess, to intellectualize. It’s almost paradoxical to intellectualize what you’re talking about. Does that make sense?

Yeah. And I think that I guess, I suppose I mean, how do you – I know you’ve done some work, you know, with the life stories. And how have you, in that respect, sort of because of when you’re doing that, you’re not asking people to, you’re not calling it transformative learning. Right? How are you approaching it so that you are getting this sort of essence and this, I guess, making these people comfortable to share their stories in this way?

Adhip Rawal (20:11):

There is a couple of things that are involved in that. So I think one thing that is involved in that is that I need to be able, as an educator, to also show the student that what they have to say also matters to me.  And if you say something that comes out of your heart, of wherever, I’m prepared for that to change me as well. That’s the assurance that I give you, you know. So it’s that as well, you know, that sort of recognition that, what the student has to say. So it’s not necessarily, you know, we’re going to explore the meaning of life. We’re going to explore the meaning of your life. And that change, I think, is very, very important. When the student hears the change in that question, they want to speak. And then it’s up to you, you know, to stay with them for however long they want to speak. Right? So you make this sort of invitation and I think it’s quite remarkable what students, when they feel safe, begin to say and what they begin to communicate. You know? And it’s up to you to allow that to happen. Right? That, you know, that you take an interest in them to the degree that they feel okay. What I have to say, I’m going to share with you.

Heather Taylor:

I love that adding your because I can see how it brings about safety because of essentially, there can’t be a wrong answer. Right? Unless you are conflicted and not being open. And even if you’re conflicted and not being open, and so give a technically incorrect answer, nobody else knows. Only you know. And actually, that’s I think that’s learning something, isn’t it? You know, sometimes when someone might tell you something about yourself and you go, that’s not what I’m like. And then you have a think about it later and you go, oh, you know? And it’s sort of that level of self reflection though in answering these questions, the meaning of your life. And I do think that’s really important as well that you’re not just asking them questions because of you have to, you know, because I know you do this in your module, your final year module as well. You’re not asking them questions because you have to or because you have to fill time. You’re asking them questions because you are genuinely interested in the answer. And the more willing they are to explore how they feel rather than just what they think about things, the more even the more interested you become. You know? So, yes, it’s lovely. It’s I think it is a lot of the time missing in education. But again, like I said, it’s not that easy – they’re very at odds with each other, the whole systems and this thing, which is very fluid, you know.

Adhip Rawal:

But I think there’s something, you know I mean, of course, I mean, there’s all sorts of pressures around this. Right? But I think if you observe a student doing this, then you can’t help but prioritize that. You know, that whole when you were asking about the personal element of it, when you see somebody speak to you in that way, you can’t help but say I’m gonna pay attention to you. I don’t need 20 students. I don’t need 40 students. All of that will be relativized because you have one person there in front of you. And that’s enough for you if you begin to see that.

Wendy Garnham (23:27):

It sort of reminds me of one of the quotes that one student said to me recently, which was that they felt heard. And that seems to be at the heart of what you’re saying is that students have that desire to feel heard rather than be one in a large group where they sort of just become quite anonymous in a large group. So I think the importance of that personalised approach is really sort of coming to the fore. I hope it’s coming to the fore. 

Chris Stocking:

Yeah. It’s something I think also that Adhip and I share in common, this respect for reflective practices of sense making through one’s own life and the experiences that they’ve had. And, it just it brings to mind some of the work that I’ve done in the intercultural spaces where the assignments are critical reflections, where the students are then trying to go back through. And they’re going back through. They’re making sense of themselves in different ways. And there’s been some very powerful pieces of work that have been submitted where students who perhaps come from backgrounds – so there was one student who came from – her parents were from one country. She grew up in another country, and then she was studying in the UK. And so she had this persistent question throughout her life as to, you know, which culture she belonged to. We come back to that sense of belonging. And through the module and deconstructing this idea of how we understand culture and how we understand identity, she came to see, and she was able to claim ownership of existing in all of these spaces and none of them as something that was novel, something that was new, a different sense to speak from and to speak into. 

And I think this was very, very powerful to see so many students taking these modules, starting to speak of their experiences, being given space to talk about their experience, about their life, and how they’ve understood it, and the struggles that they’ve had. That sense of being marginalized, that sense of being othered, of trying to fit into certain ascribed criteria that are given by others, and to claim a sense of ownership over who they are and to feel proud of who they are and of how they understand the world and to understand that they matter. And I think that this is something that I was having a discussion about this morning. This sense of belonging from an institutional kind of top down approach to creating conditions of belonging can sometimes be alienating. I found myself alienated by having people tell me how to belong and the conditions for belonging in a certain space. Whereas when we flip this and we start talking about mattering and how a student matters, then they’re starting to come together. They’re starting to collaborate and become together and share with one another and to create the conditions for what it means to belong in that class with themselves rather than it kind of being an imposition or imposed upon them.

Wendy Garnham (26:55):

And I suppose that’s the same for staff as well, isn’t it? Staff in an institution could do the same thing. That sort of coming together, that sort of sharing about our experiences and so on. So, yeah, I think it’s quite a powerful concept.

Adhip Rawal:

Yeah. Can I ask you one more thing about that? Because I think this thing that we’re speaking to, the students’ experience and our experience and why that is valuable. Because I think one of the reasons why it’s also valuable is because that’s not only characterized by difficulty, it’s also characterized by inspiration. And I think the youth, they are very sensitive to inspiration. And how do you navigate the road to the future? You need the inspiration of the youth. So I think we need that. You can’t do it without it. They have they have much more, much richer lives than I have. You know? And my job to listen to what they have to say.

Heather Taylor:

Oh, I agree with you. I think the yeah. I think the, I mean, I’ve never thought of it in these terms before, but, you know, the sort of better I think rapport sounds superficial, but, you know, like, the better sort of connection I mean rapport, but, you know, like, with the better connection you have with students and the easier you find to get them and they get you and, you know, it sort of develops generally over the term. I find that actually, you know, they do sort of teach you things about yourself, but not necessarily explicitly. Sometimes they just pose questions that challenges you, and it makes you really question, you know, like, I know, like, from one lesson, someone asked me a question and they were saying, well, isn’t this thing normal? Don’t you do this? And I went, oh, don’t ask me if as an example of whether people think this is whether this thing is normal or not because it was to do with health. And, actually, after that, I really thought about it, and I was like, I don’t care about my health. Right? And I really recognize that I physical, you know, and I really sort of thought and it bothered me for ages, not the student. The student I appreciated that they’d do you know what I mean? It was a throwaway question to them, and it was a phrasing. They didn’t mean it like you. You know? But it really made me think about it. And I’ve actually been, like, training for a run since then, haven’t I? So it is really cool. And that is that’s transformative because I had crisps for lunch. You know? So I’m still eating crisps at lunch. But is it you know, that, like, that did change me. It did not just that. It fit in with a lot of other things at the same time, but it made me think, and it made me reflect. And I think, yeah, and it’s and it the other thing is when you’re dealing with especially when you’re talking about health, sort of younger people, most of them are much younger than me. They’ve got health most of the time on their side. Do you know what I mean? More so than I have. And when they bring up these sorts of things or when they bring up stuff to do with, you know, the environment or the economy or whatever, it’s much more it’s much more important, I guess, to them because it’s gonna affect them for longer, and it’s affecting them more than it will be me. And it does just make you stop and go, oh, what am I doing? You know?

Chris Stocking:

Yeah. I like what you’re speaking to there. It kind of speaks to me of this slippage of identity positions. So we go into a classroom and we think about this teacher-student relationship. And I think what you’re talking about there is this kind of slippage where suddenly you’re a person. And you’re speaking with people, and that allows for this transformation that perhaps wouldn’t happen if you were to just hold yourself in this teacher and student identity, which is often done so it’s not embodied in the same way. And then when you suddenly slip, something happens, and it breaks the carapace of those carefully cultivated identities, and suddenly there’s that exposure. And you’re there and you’re with people. And there’s that possibility for learning and speaking and doing otherwise that affords for very interesting transformations to come about that you would never have thought that something like this, this kind of learning might take place in that space. And suddenly, just through a conversation, just through a question, you’re changing things about the way that you live in your lifestyle. And I think that’s it’s very, very important that we start to recognize these moments in a classroom and we start to give voice to them and shape them because these are the stories that, at least for me, really interest me and that remind me that here in the university, we are people, we are working with the youth who, as Adhip said, are the ones that are going to be shaping the future. You know? So how do we support them, and how do we allow them to come back to themselves as people in these learning spaces? 

And I think the only way we can do that, and Adhip made this lovely distinction earlier, not learning about life, we’re learning about your life. That suddenly makes it very personable. And then when we’re thinking, it becomes more complex than when we start thinking about global universities and all of the different experiences and framings and positionalities that come into these learning spaces that have to be recognized and spoken to. And the only way we do that in a meaningful sense, I believe, is through hearing one another, through listening to one another’s stories, of understanding one another. And that requires this that that we allow for these personal narratives and histories to be present in the classroom. Because when you start to speak of them and you start to speak to them as, you know, you know, there are three psychologists here in in this this kind of speaking therapies, there’s something very transformative about saying and talking and hearing yourself say words that perhaps you wouldn’t say otherwise. And to hear that repeated back in other ways, to see where it touches and connects with the other person that you’re talking to, to allow for that collaborative becoming as research, as a methodology of research, that collaborative becoming, sharing stories in the space and seeing what comes out of it, and reflecting on that, and learning the tools to speak and listen and be heard, and to allow yourself the luxury of sounding like an idiot.

Wendy Garnham (33:23):

I think it is that opening up. Yeah. Isn’t it? Just opening yourself up. And the more you do that, the more the students seem keen to do it.

Heather Taylor:

Being willing to get things wrong and say I don’t know – I’m always saying I don’t know because I don’t know.

Wendy Garnham:

When technology doesn’t work.

Heather Taylor:

Yeah. When technology doesn’t work. I think also, you know, even sharing sometimes sharing little things about – I’m always sharing things about myself with my students. It’s not even deliberate. It’s sometimes because of something. I don’t mean, like, my PIN number or whatever. I mean, like, you know, just things that little anecdotes that, like, pop into my head. Because for me, it’s made me able to understand something, and you just have a go and see if it helps them. And I do find actually that, you know, I’m not doing it with the intention of getting them to share. Right? I don’t, because I honestly, I don’t mean to do it as it happens. It just happens, But it does help them share. And I think it also helps them recognize they’re allow allowed to give an answer or allowed to give some input that isn’t academic. You’re allowed to give a response that you didn’t get out of a book.

Chris Stocking:

It’s another way of making sense of the learning experience, but through ways of speaking that aren’t themselves inherently academic, and I think that that opens up the possibility of learning, and learning about disciplinary content as well, by speaking about it, by hearing a terminology, not some terminology, not necessarily fully grasping it, but allowing it to trigger moments in your life and to discuss these to bring yourself into the learning environment as a way of navigating and migrating back towards developing a more full, embodied understanding of the concepts, the terms, the theories, the research that you’re reading about, thinking about, challenging. But I think that that’s very important for me is that embodied sense. And the only way it really becomes embodied is if we’re fully present to it. So there’s also some of those discussions that we’ve had. And I remember the last time we spoke, we were talking about just even the constraints of a classroom. And I was talking to a friend last night about this. He’s got a younger daughter who’s 10. And, they were discussing her favourite subject at school, and she said that it was physical education because she can learn while she’s moving. You know? And this idea, I think, is Wendy, you’ve been involved in outdoors learning, so learning while walking, the way that it triggers makes you think differently, have different conversations. So opening up all these possibilities for learning otherwise. Learning in different ways that aren’t necessarily just sitting down and making notes and listening and then talking in in an abstract and somewhat removed sense.

Heather Taylor:

What advice would you give to anyone wanting to make learning transformative?

Adhip Rawal (36:27):

So I think we’ve touched on something just now which I think is important in that, which I think is the recognition that I don’t know. And that sort of recognition that I also don’t know who I am really. Because I think there’s something liberating in that. I mean, the young person, if he hears another, if he hears an educator saying I also don’t know who I am, there’s something I think that that recognition does that allows for this deeper connection to become present. Because I think essentially what we’re saying is that the transformation doesn’t require the input of money. It doesn’t necessarily require the input of knowledge as such. Maybe certain knowledge can help you keep that, sort of keep transformation in vicinity, but essentially it’s about relational support. And I think also that flow of recognition that what that transformation will be, we don’t know. I don’t know. What would you say, Chris, about that?

Chris Stocking:

Yeah. I mean, it’s a very difficult question because you know, the first thing that, you know, when we were thinking about this podcast and I was making notes was that, you know, we’re not really sure at this stage what transformative learning really is. And I think that probably this discussion has revealed somewhat that we’re still trying to understand what it is that we’re talking about and how we make sense of it and how we bring that into a more formal academic setting. But relationality, I think, is definitely important. And I think that the sort of the peeling away of layers to understand again and to remind ourselves that from an educational perspective and as educators that they are people before us. They aren’t students. They are people who have incredibly rich, vibrant stories, experiences, inspiring, difficult, and all of that is always present in any shared space. And that we should never make assumptions about how somebody is responding in a classroom. And that we should afford for the opportunity for different kinds of discussions, different kinds of conversations to emerge. And if they open up organically and naturally to work with that as a learning substance and material to feed and fold ourselves into to support the learning and to support that sense of being present with one another.

Adhip Rawal:

Yeah. Yeah. So then maybe what one thing that we’re saying is that any kind of transformation requires communication. Right? And it requires us to be present to the communication, to the full spectrum of communication. So, essentially, that’s a function of attention. You know? The depth of my attention might be very important and, you know, somehow, facilitating this process from coming about.

Chris Stocking:

I think Wendy had mentioned that, being heard, some feedback that you’d heard from students, that idea of being heard, I think, is also very important. Because when you afford that space for somebody to speak and you don’t allow them you don’t afford this space of them speaking, waiting to navigate the conversation back where you want it to go, but you respond to whatever it is that’s being said in a meaningful way. I think that is very important that people feel heard, that they feel visible, that they have a voice that matters, that matters to you as an educator, as Adhip said earlier. And I think that, yes, that that being present, that capacity to listen, tenderly and in a way that is actively involved in caring for the cultivation of another human being.

Heather Taylor:

I would like to thank our guests, Adhip Rawal and Chris Stocking.

Adhip Rawal:

Thank you.

Chris Stocking:

Thank you.

Heather Taylor:

And thank you for listening. Goodbye. 

This has been the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex, created by Sarah Watson, Wendy Garnham, and Heather Taylor, and produced by Simon Overton. For more episodes, as well as articles, blogs, case studies, and infographics, please visit blogs. Sussex.ac.uk/learning-matters.

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Scholarship Opportunities in Education –Autumn 2025

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A group of four people dressed in business attire walk together through an open glass doorway into a courtyard. The courtyard is flanked by modern brick and glass buildings with trees and greenery lining the walkway. In the background, other individuals are seen walking or sitting on benches, engaging in conversation or working on laptops. The sky is clear with a few clouds, suggesting a pleasant day

As the autumn term begins, we’re delighted to welcome students and colleagues back to campus. For those involved in teaching, learning, and academic development, this season brings a wealth of opportunities to engage with educational scholarship—both at the University of Sussex and across the sector.

Where to publish

Whether you’re new to educational research or looking to share innovative practice, there are many platforms to consider:

  • Learning Matters – Sussex’s own space for reflections and scholarship on teaching and learning. Contribute a case study, blog post, article or take part in our podcast.
  • Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education (JLDHE) – Serves an international readership interested in all aspects of learning and teaching in higher education.
  • Open Scholarship of Teaching and Learning – Captures the rich contexts, experiences, and voices from colleagues across the sector. The journal encourage all types of writing from more traditional educational inquiries, to working-out-loud papers and provocations.
  • Teaching and Learning Inquiry – Publishes scholarly works on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in higher education. This includes original research, theory, or commentary and may include empirical and interpretive investigations, theoretical analyses, thought-provoking essays, works about the state of the field, or innovative genres. 
  • Practitioner Research in Higher Education – Publishes research and evaluation papers that contribute to the understanding of theory, policy and practice in teaching and supporting learning. 
  • RAISE Journal – Publishes contributions dealing with student engagement in Higher Education from a disciplinary or multi-disciplinary perspective.
  • Journal of Education, Innovation, Partnership and Change – Welcomes articles, case studies and opinion pieces in written or video format relating to learning, teaching and assessment with the context of students and staff as co-creators and change agents. Our aim is to inspire, educate, amuse, and generally engage its readership.
  • SEDA Blog – The SEDA Blog is a chance for higher education professionals and stakeholders, including students, to share ideas, opinions, good practice and reflections that can inform staff development in higher education.

Events to attend

Join us at Sussex on 26th November (13:00–16:00, Bramber House 255) for an interactive event on oracy in higher education. Explore how speaking and listening can be embedded into the curriculum to support inclusion, engagement, and academic integrity. Register via Eventbrite

Beyond Sussex, sector-wide events including registration and calls for contributions:

  • Access, Participation and Student Success Conference (UUK, 20 Nov) – A key event bringing together colleagues from across the sector to explore the evolving landscape of student equity and opportunity.
  • SHIFT 2026 (Greenwich, 6–7 Jan) – This conference celebrates the role of students as active partners in shaping the future of higher education. By championing co-creation, collaboration, and inclusive practice, we explore how institutions can foster belonging and empower student agency. Proposals. Registration.  
  • Compassion, collegiality and communities in higher education: challenging the discourse SRHE International Conference 2025(28 Nov online; 2–4 Dec Nottingham) – The SRHE annual international conference aims to advance the understanding of higher education, support and disseminate research and practice, and provide a platform for the perspectives and knowledge offered by systematic research and scholarship. 
  • Assessment and Feedback Symposium 2025– (online 4th November) -This presenter-led virtual event will provide teaching and support staff from across the sector with a space to exchange and disseminate new and different ways of thinking about assessment and feedback.
  • Educational Excellence Symposium 2025– (online 9th December) – This year’s symposium will bring together educators, academic leaders, professional services, and students to explore what really works in delivering high-quality, inclusive, and impactful education.
  • Artificial Intelligence Symposium 2026(online 10th February) – A presenter-led event to learn, discuss and share latest practices and pedagogies utilising artificial intelligence.
  • Employability Symposium 2026 (online 10th March) – The Employability Symposium 2026 aims to bring together cutting-edge examples of how employability can be embedded at school, faculty/college and/or institutional levels.
Posted in Uncategorised

Sustainability and simulations: Using simulations to engage first-year Business students

Posted on by Kitty Horne — No Comments ↓

Alison Bailey is an Associate Professor in Management at the University of Sussex Business School and is the convenor of the Introduction to Business and Management (IBM) a large core module taken by nearly every first-year business student in their very first term. Alison’s teaching research focuses on using team-based learning to enhance student engagement and outcomes in higher education and business simulations, other areas of interest include leadership and sustainability. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SHEA), a Certified Management and Business Educator (CMBE), a member of the Team-Based Learning Collaborative and has recently been appointed as the PRME London & South-East Co-Lead.

What I did

I redesigned the IBM module to integrate experiential learning through a business simulation game, replacing outdated assessments and traditional lectures with more active, practice-oriented experiences. The aim was to combine theoretical learning with real-world application, teamwork, and critical thinking. All delivered in a way that keeps students motivated and connected from day one.

The module is structured in two halves: the first focuses on foundational business theory, and the second immerses students in a business simulation where they apply that theory in running a virtual company. Over the years, we’ve evolved the simulation component.

Why I did it

The diversity of knowledge levels among first-year students makes this module particularly challenging. Some students arrive with a deep understanding of business concepts, others have never studied business before. My goal was to design a module that levels the playing field, engages everyone regardless of background, and sets a strong foundation for their degree.

Personally, I’m a social constructivist teacher. I believe students learn best when they can apply theory to practice in meaningful, collaborative settings. The previous iteration of the module lacked a clear connection between theory and practical application. Introducing a simulation and strengthening its link to classroom content helped bridge that gap. Additionally, embedding sustainability and employability throughout the course ensures that students not only learn and put into practice business theory but also gain essential, future-facing skills.

How it works

In weeks 1–5, students are introduced to key business concepts, from organisational structures to marketing and finance using team-based learning resulting in an MCQ to test knowledge. Going forward this will be assessed through a poster presentation and a reflective audio file focusing on sustainability frameworks. From week 7 onwards, students work in teams to manage a virtual business using a simulation game. Originally, this was Marketplace Business Fundamentals, where students ran a bicycle company. For the coming academic year, we’ve adopted an ESG-focused simulation called Humbro from SAGE Publishing where students make decisions based on real-time global news events, such as supply chain disruptions.

Each week in the simulation represents a financial quarter, and teams compete on metrics such as market share and profitability. A balanced scorecard approach is used to assess performance. Weekly rankings are shared, which fosters a healthy competitive spirit and the simulation concludes with a team presentation and peer evaluation via Buddycheck.

Throughout, we embed sustainability using tools like the TASK certificate and the Climate Fresk. We even collapsed a week of the module to run Climate Fresk workshops, bringing together diverse student groups to reflect on climate impacts and corporate responsibility.

Impact and student feedback

The student response has been overwhelmingly positive. Many appreciate the practical, team-based nature of the module and the opportunity to form early friendships. They describe the classes as inclusive and engaging, and the simulation itself as highly motivating – particularly the live leaderboards, which fuel their competitive instincts!

The sustainability focus has also resonated. Students are beginning to see ESG not just as a theoretical add-on but as central to business strategy. In fact, some students then trained as Climate Fresk facilitators after participating in the workshop, with others hoping to train this academic year. 

On the flip side, presentations can be anxiety-inducing for some, and peer complaints about unequal team contributions do come up. That’s where Buddycheck has been incredibly helpful, giving students a fair and transparent way to evaluate each other.

Future practice

Going forward, we’re making several key changes. We’ve scrapped the multiple-choice tests as they weren’t fit for purpose in large lecture theatres and didn’t support deep learning. The new poster and audio reflection are much better aligned with our goals.

We’re also embedding a new simulation which brings new challenges and opportunities. It’s longer, 12 rounds instead of 4; has a strong ESG emphasis; and integrates current global events, which adds complexity and realism. We’ll continue running the Climate Fresk annually, and we’ve strengthened ties with the International Study Centre to ensure students from all backgrounds can participate and feel part of the community.

We’re also inviting in a wider range of guest speakers, including representatives from B Corps, sustainable businesses, and local entrepreneurs, to enrich the module with real-world voices.

Top tips

  1. Just do it. Don’t be afraid to introduce a simulation. Yes, it’s resource-intensive and complex, but the rewards are huge in terms of student engagement and learning outcomes.
  2. Know it inside out. Play the simulation game yourself. Try to “break” it. You need to understand the mechanics fully because at least one student will probably figure it out faster than you! Strong understanding also helps you align it with your learning outcomes.
  3. Train your staff. All teaching staff need proper hands-on training with the simulation. We run full-team trial games and ensure everyone is confident before term begins. This is especially important for a consistent student experience across a large cohort.
  4. Design for inclusivity and clarity. Create clear, step-by-step resources, especially for neurodiverse students. Simulations can be overwhelming without strong scaffolding.
  5. Link it to employability and sustainability. Choose a simulation that not only teaches business acumen but also builds soft skills like teamwork, communication, and adaptability.
  6. Speak to staff running simulations or Fresks. Gabriella Cagliesi, Rashaad Shabab and Sambit Bhattacharyya run MarketPlace Corporate Capitalism with Apprenticeship students; Alex Pearson and Claire Tymoshyshyn run and organise Climate Fresk.
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Posted in Case Studies

Reflections on working for the Office for Students: Conversation with Prof Graeme Pedlingham

Posted on by Sarah Watson — No Comments ↓

Prof Graeme Pedlingham, Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor for Student Experience, talks to us about his time working for the Office for Students. 

Photograph of Graeme Pedlingham
Prof Graeme Pedlingham

Can you tell us a little about your role at the Office for Students? 

Around 2022, the Office for Students (OfS) was setting up a new unit focused on quality investigations, linked to the implementation of new conditions of registration. I became the first Principal Assessor, helping to establish the structures and lead some of the initial investigations. These were focused on the B conditions, academic experience, robustness of assessment, and so on, particularly where there were concerns about the quality of provision in specific subject areas. 

I was involved in developing training and guidance for a wider pool of assessors. I enjoy working on new initiatives and helping shape things from the ground up, especially when they have the potential to positively impact the sector. I’m particularly interested in how we define and assess quality in higher education, and how we account for the diversity of institutions and contexts. 

My priority was ensuring assessment teams operated appropriately, while also being transparent with institutions. Investigations can be anxiety-inducing, so it was important to communicate clearly that this wasn’t about catching individuals out, it was about examining systems and processes, and their impact on students. We focused on authentic staff and student voices, sometimes observing teaching, but mostly through conversations. 

Can you walk us through a typical assessment process? 

It usually started with data, identifying areas of potential risk. We’d request further information from the institution and prepare for site visits, focusing on key questions and stakeholders. The aim was to triangulate evidence: data, staff interviews, student feedback, policies, committee observations. You couldn’t rely on one source, you had to build a full picture. Sometimes the data pointed to issues that weren’t there, and sometimes it revealed real problems. 

It was satisfying to uncover root causes and help institutions make positive changes. But we were careful not to overburden them, requests had to be purposeful. The goal was always improvement, not punishment. 

What were some of the most important insights you gained? 

The diversity of the sector is key. Quality assessors need open minds and a strong focus on student outcomes. Independence is also crucial, bringing subject expertise and practitioner insight to the role. Assessors need to recognise their own expertise and use it to evaluate fairly and constructively. 

Did you always work within your own subject area? 

Not always. Each team had at least one subject expert, but as Principal Assessor, I often chaired the group, similar to a validation panel setup. 

How did your work with the OfS influence your practice at Sussex? 

It sharpened my focus on impact, evidence, and outcomes. I became more questioning and reflective. Writing the reports was a challenge, balancing priorities and articulating issues clearly using data and expert knowledge. It’s like a more intensive version of external examining. It also deepened my appreciation for how scholarship informs practice. Seeing different institutional approaches and their effects on students was incredibly valuable for that. 

What advice would you give to colleagues considering a similar role? 

  1. Be open to different structures of working and work collaboratively.  
  1. People skills are essential.  
  1. You also need an interest in regulatory frameworks and how they translate into practice. Understanding the interaction between high-level regulation and on-the-ground data and experience is key.  
  1. Most importantly, keep the student impact front and centre. Quality isn’t abstract, it affects real people and their outcomes. 
Posted in Case Studies

Walk with me: Exploring community, belonging and inclusion through walking interviews

Posted on by Kitty Horne — No Comments ↓

Dr Verona Ni Drisceoil is a Reader in Legal Education and a member of the Education Team, currently leading on Assessment and Gen AI policy, at Sussex Law School. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA), Co-Convenor of the International Connecting Legal Education Network and a Judge of the OUP Law Teacher of the Year Award.

Introduction

In the Spring Term of 2025, I, along with my colleagues Jeanette Ashton and Jo Wilson, ‘walked with’ nine of our first-year students to better understand and explore what community, belonging and inclusion means for them in the everyday. In this blog post, I share the background of the ‘Walk with Me’ project, a bit about walking interviews and some of the preliminary findings from the project, in advance of a longer piece. I hope these findings will be useful as we all prepare for another academic year. The ‘Walk with Me’ project was supported by the Sussex Education and Innovation Fund.

Background

The start point for the ‘Walk with Me’ project came about from a place of discomfort with our commitments to community and belonging in higher education. Whilst the terms community, belonging and inclusion are commonplace in higher education (HE) policy and viewed as positive and required for an enhanced student experience, there is much less clarity, as I have previously noted, about what the terms really mean and look like for the everyday lived experience of students, and indeed staff, in HE. Drawing on the work of Gravett, Ajjawi and O’Shea, I argue that we need to challenge our conceptualisation of these terms as they relate to both students and staff and the perceived frame within which community and belonging sits in HE.

Set against the challenges presented by increased student numbers, post pandemic trauma, the cost-of-living crisis, low attendance and poor mental health, this project, utilising walking as a research method, set out to walk with students to help better understand community, belonging and inclusion in the everyday. This approach (walking with students 1-2-1, side by side), as opposed to more traditional surveys and student group interviews, hoped to shift the power imbalance somewhat and to provide for more meaningful and authentic opportunities for spontaneous and holistic conversation about self and being within what can often become rather abstract or superficial conversations about community and belonging in HE.

Why walking interviews?

Walking as a research method, often referred to as walking interviews or mobile ethnography, has gained popularity in qualitative research due to its unique benefits (See O’ Neill & Roberts, 2019). It has been used widely in geography and more recently in health studies, criminology, and education. As researchers, it was not an approach we were familiar with, but we all felt drawn to engaging in a research approach that felt deeper, and more relational (see Gravett, 2023). According to O’Neill & Roberts, walking interviews allow the researcher to engage with participants ‘on the move’ in a more natural and holistic way, thereby providing insights into daily lives and experiences. The act of walking, they write, ‘engages the senses: looking, hearing, the feeling of being touched by air, rain, or other elements of the environmental atmosphere, and contact with changing aromas’ (O’Neill & Roberts, 2019:16) On the elements, we certainly experienced them all – cold, rain, wind, and sunshine. We all agreed that if we were taking this approach again, we would give more thought to the timing of the year. So, something to factor in, if you are keen to utilise walking interviews! Other things to factor in include time commitments, recording devices and transcription. There are, of course, now several AI tools that can be used to transcribe audio recordings, but this may not be allowed within your ethical review so do explore in advance.

The unique benefits…

On the unique benefits that O’Neill & Roberts speak about, as researchers we felt a more meaningful connection with the participants through this research. The student participants also spoke positively about the experience; how they enjoyed the conversations and building a connection with us. For us, as we moved through the term, the interviews (but felt more like conversations, and that is the point) moved into deeper discussions on a range of community and belonging issues including accessibility and the lack of accessibility on campus (one of our participants is visually impaired), race, class, discrimination, faith, and physical spaces – and how all can impact belonging, and a sense of community. In some respects, the conversations reinforced much of what we knew but it’s quite different when a first-year student walking side by side shares their personal story and journey of what community, belonging, class, race and exclusion feels like in the everyday. That ‘you have to be selective about events you go to in welcome week because of cost’, that ‘I was worried about racism in this country before starting university’, or that ‘I sometimes feel more connected to my teacher than other students’.

Some preliminary findings…

As researchers, we all felt this project was different – it felt more meaningful and relational. The stories and voices of the project were powerful. There was space and time to hear the nuance and challenge our own biases and practice too. Belonging, and community, is not, as Ajjawi, Gravett and O’ Shea write, a homogeneous experience. In fact, belonging can be ‘political’ (see Yuval-Davis, 2006). It can be ableist (Nieminen & Pesonen, 2021). The stories of this project landed in a way that served as an important reminder to us as legal educators to be mindful of how our students, all with their own story and lived experience, are navigating through our law schools and campuses – and that for students not from the global majority, the challenge can be greater; that community, belonging and ‘inclusion’ events can be exclusionary, and reinforce barriers to connection and relationality. Who gets to belong?

Below, I highlight four preliminary findings from the project:

  1. Many of our students value their faith; that it is part of belongingand it can help them through difficult periods of the academic year. By admission, we weren’t expecting this to come through as strongly as it did. When we talk to students about wellbeing, friendships, academic and personal challenges, recognise that faith might be a key part of a student’s identity and life and hold a space for that. 
  2. Students value meaningful connections with their teachers. It is probably fair to say that when we speak of community and belonging, we often focus on creating spaces ‘for’ students, rather than ‘with’. Many students value connection with their teachers as well.
  3. Social and extra-curricular have a place in our efforts to build community and belonging but it is important to also focus on what happens in the classroom. Our default to the social and extra-curricular as sites of, and for, building community and belonging, and often inclusion, though understandable, can be problematic, and can lead to “feel good” visible performativity rather than meaningful interventions and attention for all students in the academic sphere. Moreover, the framing and over reliance on the social can be particularly problematic in a cost-of-living crisis when we know that many of our students are now commuting or forced to work 20 to 40 hours a week to pay rent and bills. Coming to campus for additional social, ‘community’ orientated (community for who?) events may no longer be feasible or a priority for many of our students.
  4. Build an enabling environment. Teaching structures, timetables and physical environments matter in terms of how students experience and ‘feel’ community and belonging. Have you ever thought about how the timetable and/or layout of your classroom hinders or supports connection? Is there anything you can do to design a more meaningful learning experience for all students such as changing the layout of the room.

References

Ajjawi, R., Gravett, K., & O’Shea, S. (2023). The politics of student belonging: Identity and purpose. Teaching in Higher Education, 28(1), 1-14.

Gravett, K., & Ajjawi, R. (2022). Belonging as situated practice. Studies in Higher Education, 47(7), 1386-1398.

Gravett, K. (2023). Relational pedagogies: Connections and mattering in higher education. Bloomsbury Academic.

Gravett, K., Ajjawi, R., & O’Shea, S., Belonging to and beyond higher education in hybrid spaces (Society for Research in Higher Education 2023). Available: https://srhe.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Karen_Gravett_Award_Report.pdf;

Moore, I., & Ní Drisceoil, V. (2023). Wellbeing and transition to law school: The complexities of confidence, community, and belonging. In E. Jones & C. Strevens (Eds.), Wellbeing and transitions in law: Legal education and the legal profession (pp. 18-19). Palgrave Macmillan.

Ní Drisceoil, V. (2025). Critiquing commitments to community and belonging in today’s law school: who does the labour? The Law Teacher, 59(2), 181–199.

Nieminen, J., & Pesonen, H. (2021). Politicising inclusive learning environments: How to foster belonging and challenge ableism? Higher Education Research & Development, 41(6), 2020

O’Neill, M., & Roberts, B. (2019). Walking methods: Research on the move. Routledge.

Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Belonging and the politics of belonging. Patterns of Prejudice, 40(3), 197-211.

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Posted in Blog

About this blog

Learning Matters provides a space for multiple and diverse forms of writing about teaching and learning at Sussex. We welcome contributions from staff as well as external collaborators. All submissions are assigned to a reviewer who will get in touch to discuss next steps. Find out more on our About page.

Please note that blog posts reflect the information and perspectives at the time of publication.