In July this year, 90 colleagues from across the University came together to share their experiences and insights into teaching, learning and assessment at Sussex. Over two days, both online and in person, the Education Festival covered a whole range of topics, from gamification and using social media to build learning communities, to developing student evaluative judgement and the impacts of generative AI.  

The University’s Vice Chancellor, Sasha Roseneil, opened the festival by celebrating the work of teaching colleagues, the growing impact of the Education and Innovation Fund projects, and the increased support for Advance HE Fellowships here at Sussex.  

The task of summarising all the exchanges we enjoyed during the festival is a difficult one: we saw over thirty different talks, sessions and workshops across the two days. The programme is a helpful starting point, as all the slides and resources we have permission to share are linked there (for Sussex colleagues). Alongside several Learning Matters case studies and blogs from our speakers to be published in the coming months, this blog highlights three key themes we saw emerging across the two days.  

1. Student belonging  

Belonging is recognised as crucial to student success, but equally hard to define and quantify (Robertson et al., 2019). A students’ sense of belonging at university can impact their entire experience, including their chances of completing their course and their results, and was, unsurprisingly, the focus of many speakers at the festival. Fiona Clements (Law, Politics and Sociology) presented her work on the ‘Humans of Sussex Law School,’ a post-pandemic project on Instagram which aims to build connection and belonging between students and staff. The project has seen great engagement, with one student commenting that it makes Law feel ‘more like a family’. In the Q+A, participants discussed the difficult balance between wanting to build a strong community and expanding the project wider across the faculty.   

Several talks focused on initiatives to build student belonging across the university, all of which emphasised the importance of co-creation and student voice. Chloe Dobson (Library) and Elena Sargent (Student Connector) also found social media important for promoting their work on well-being spaces in the Library. Joanna Little (Project Manager) and Eleanor Ferguson (Library) highlighted the challenges Sussex students can face trying to find accessible and welcoming study spaces, whilst Emily Danvers (Education and Social Work) focused on student needs in their own study spaces.  

Other speakers focused on removing barriers to belonging for specific groups of students. Gavin Mensah-Coker (Media, Arts and Humanities) shared insights from his ongoing research into the experience of BAME students with learning differences and the impacts of these intersections on student retention and success. Sarah Watson (Educational Enhancement) and Simon Overton (Educational Enhancement) discussed their Education and Innovation Funded project, which collaborated with international students to provide resource and recommendation for supporting belonging for our international student cohorts at the University. Sophie Anns (Psychology) shared valuable recommendations for supporting autistic students at university. Lastly, Namse Peter Udosen (Education and Social Work) engaged participants in a reflective creative writing exercise, asking us to explore our own cultural heritage to demonstrate his work on decolonising literacy development. 

2. Scaffolding student learning 

Several of our speakers covered the importance of carefully structuring students’ learning across their modules and courses. Scaffolding was raised in several sessions, including Jon Powell’s (Engineering and Informatics) lightning talk on developing student understanding of marking criteria. Discussions during the Q+A covered the tensions between providing enough support early on in course, whilst trying not to restrict students’ creativity and personal expression.  

Jo Wilson (Law, Politics and Sociology) raised questions for us to consider with optionality in assessment, and the difficult balancing act of providing students with enough formative experience of innovative assessments to sufficiently build their assessment literacy when confronted with choice. This issue was also picked up by Gillian Emerson (Education and Social Work) and Hayley Preston-Smith (Education and Social Work) who shared the activity cards they have developed to help their first year PGCE students identify, situate and discuss key educational theorists. We discussed how the cards could scaffold students’ information literacy, as well as their confidence.     

The constraints of our predominantly modularised approach to assessment were raised several times in the context of scaffolding. The new Curriculum Principles as part of Curriculum Reimagined prioritise a course approach to student learning and assessment mapping, so these discussions will be important in the coming years.  

3. Developing student’s evaluative judgement 

Developing students’ self-reflection skills was another running theme of talks, particularly in the context of generative AI. Verona Ní Drisceoil (Law, Politics and Sociology) provided a deep dive into the scholarship of developing student evaluative judgement and her learnings from scaffolding student self-reflection in her module. Both Verona and Jon Powell noted that students can be hesitant to engage with self-reflection, and discussed how reframing to evaluative judgement and the development of essential skills can help.  

Recent Sussex graduates Max Baylis and Aaron Fowler (University of Sussex Business School) also covered evaluative judgement, highlighting its critical importance for students as we navigate a new generative AI landscape. Together, they demonstrated some of the sophisticated ways students are co-writing assignments with generative AI. In response, they suggested turning Bloom’s Taxonomy on its head, and prioritising the development of higher order thinking skills in the first year. On a similar theme, Angela Gao (University of Sussex Business School), explored the implications of AI for how we write learning outcomes and for the role of the lecturer to one which focuses less on content, and more on students. 

In response to the growing interest in embedding student reflection into the curriculum, we have developed further guidance on our webpage. Many of our speakers will also be following up with blogs and case studies to share their experiences and insights- watch this space!  

If you’d like to help out with the organisation of the Festival next year, or have ideas for its development in future years, please get in touch with Charlie Crouch: c.h.crouch@sussex.ac.uk