Faculty Librarians get there before us ...

We managed to keep Maria Mawson and Vic Grant waiting a good 15 minutes whilst I queued for our coffees in the City View Cafe yesterday - top tip to the uninitiated; in semester time, don't arrange to meet on the hour 'cos there's a healthy queue between lectures ...

But more importantly, we also learned that they've got there before us in a hub-like sense too. As two of the six new Faculty Librarians - Vic for Medicine, Maria for Social Sciences - they have their own web pages from which you can find handy links to a range of discipline specific library subject guides (amongst other things). In addition, Medicine, Dentistry, English and History have their very own librarian's blogs so if any of these are your bag, why not take a look? The first two can be accessed via Vic's web page, the latter via Clare Scott's, Faculty Librarian for the Arts and Humanities.

Thanks to Maria and Vic for making the time to meet with (and wait for) us. We look forward to working with them more closely as TASH moves towards its production phase.

Moving on...report on the September 16th meeting

Today’s project meeting was very successful, both in terms of being able to disseminate what has happened on the project thus far, and for getting feedback, questions, steers, and more interested parties on board. In terms of disseminating project activities, this was done through a series of presentations by core team members – Kath Linehan on her work with the Pure Science LTAs and the tutor-facing guides written to date; Linda Gray sharing her work with the Engineering LTAs and the location of academic skills resources within her faculty; Steve Collier reporting on our first focus group with students; and Willy Kitchen talking about the evolving design and structure of the resource. (Copies of all these presentations are available by clicking the links, or from the project website). There were very helpful questions asked, and lots of good discussion points raised, both in this reporting section and the more general discussion; and I’ll discuss a few of the ones that stayed with me.

The over-riding message was that we need to emphasise the relevance to students of the resource. Their motivation, it was suggested, includes fair slices of wanting to get a job, and wanting to learn more about a subject that interests them; so we need to ensure that TASH addresses both these user needs. This relates closely to getting the language right – not all staff, let along students, will respond to phrases like “academic literacy”, so we need to ensure the terms we use are broad and welcome enough to encompass a range of perspectives and users. One way to achieve this is via student-generated material, or, equally excitingly, materials generated by recent graduates; there are precedents for both of these, for example the excellent CILASS Student Ambassador Network pages, and the Careers Service’s podcasts about “A day in the life of…” all sorts of exciting people. We also need to ensure that the resource meets its promises of being multimedia and rich, to cater for the wide range of learning styles and backgrounds of our students. This is by way of some defensiveness – if at the moment the project team are concentrating a lot on written documents, it doesn’t mean that the entire resource will have outputs in this format! And finally, we need to ensure the whole range of staff in the university are included and interested in the resource. The particular groups identified in discussion included hourly-paid staff, in teaching and support capacities, and full-time support staff; often, these people are the more friendly face within a department, to whom the student will turn. They, therefore, need to be in-tune with TASH, and aware of what it has to offer.

So, what next? Organising focus groups is the next big task, and we’re in active discussions with the Union of Students, CILASS, and other established networks to support this. We’ll also be concentrating on finding what resources are already available within the institution, and where possible, generating tutor-facing guides to communicate these in a standard form. And we’ll also be continuing to look at our skills areas, and benchmarking them against documents with general currency, such as The Sheffield Graduate profile. If we receive as much support and enthusiasm for the rest of the project as we did in today’s meeting, then it should be (relatively speaking) a walk in the park.

Seeing double: when TASH met Tash (Semmens, that is)

The third of four very successful meetings yesterday was a "working lunch" with Tash Semmens from Law. It was a little galling, on Yorkshire Day, to find the University Arms all sold out of Yorkshire puddings by 1pm, but your correspondent allowed himself a bitter shandy to celebrate instead (strictly in the interests of modelling real world Friday-lunchtime graduate professionalism, you understand).

Like Chetna and Elena beforehand, it was really encouraging to find Tash also full of enthusiam for the project, and offering a series of perspectives and suggestions which clearly complemented those previously put forward by Zoe Ollerenshaw, some of which were previously blogged here. In this earlier posting, we've already flagged up the valuable insights Law can offer in relation to scale, international taught PG students and graduate professionalism (through the LPC) amongst other things. In addition, Tash points up the distinctive aspects that the department's BA in Social Policy and Criminology (shared with Sociological Studies) brings to the mix, and the broader range of social science research skills which these UG students are encouraged to develop alongside the common focus upon problem-solving and analytical skills which they encounter in the law modules which they take. One area in which this manifests itself is the analysis of crime statistics - both quantitative measures of reported crime and more qualitative measures of perceived exposure to crime - and plans are afoot to twist Tash's arm just enough to help us develop a little exercise for the hub looking at some of the issues involved in relation to Sheffield post-code areas, for example, and which can be used as one way of getting students to think about visiting the MASH and other resources if the process of translating figures into words and arguments, and back again, is an uncomfortable one for them ... I'm pleased to report she seems very willing at present.

Other more concrete outcomes from yesterday:

• Tash is keen to explore the possibilities of embedding aspects of the TASH resource within the core first year UG module Understanding Law 1, which has already benefitted from close collaboration with the Library and their Information Skills Tutorials, and we will be very happy to keep this dialogue open;
• As reported by Tim below, Tash will be contacting second and third year UG mentors who may be willing to help us with a student focus group, tentatively timetabled for Friday 5th September; we hope to haul along some Medics, Dentists and SAN reps too - if you know of any students at a loose end in early September who may have a view on what TASH should contain, please do let us know or encourage them to get in touch;
• Tash is also looking to conduct a small piece of research as part of her CILASS academic fellowship looking at (something like) student perceptions of self and their developing status as learners/professionals, which may very well tally with our academic literacy and personal/inter-personal skills categories (and indeed ideas around self-efficacy too, perhaps?) - the idea is likely to involve holding a series of student focus groups which TASH may be able to help facilitate/learn from.

Finally, it is worth noting perhaps that, not for the first time, discussions also touched upon the possibilities of TASH becoming a useful vehicle for embedding elements of skills enhancement exercises into (newly revamped?) PDP strategies - another way in which TASH can serve in time to assist academic colleagues' efforts to support student's individual academic and personal development; and something else to add to the list of cross-institutional initiatives to bring to a project cross-pollination and resourse sharing/pooling meeting?

Law and TASH

Met this morning with Zoe Ollerenshaw in Law who lectures on the Legal Practice Course and is about to take up the roles of chair of the department's Teaching Quality committee and of teaching advocate across the department's full UG provision. Our conversation ranged over a wide range of skills areas of importance to Law UGs, students on the LPC, and PG students on a range of masters courses. Particular challenges mentioned, amongst others, were those encountered by second language overseas students on masters programmes, given the emphasis upon semantic meanings stressed in legal discourse (and for whom the department is developing compulsory sessions with ELTC); LPC students who, to an extent, have to "unlearn" some of the more fence sitting and discursive elements of UG writing conventions (in favour of some plain speaking advice to clients who wanted to know specific answers to specific questions); and the more general challenge of supporting the huge numbers of UG students throughout their studies given very high staff to student ratios.

There are clearly approaches TASH can learn from Law and LPC, including around the transition from UG to LPC and what this has to say about academic literacy .v. graduate professionalism, and writing (and being assessed) for/by different audiences. Likewise, Zoe sees that TASH and the 7 sk/hills currently outlined pretty much cover all the boxes Law will want to tick - and has the potential to assist greatly in developing a more coherent package of skills enhancement and reflective learning for UGs over the course of their studies.

Zoe is keen to remain involved, will be at the 17 July meeting, and will liaise with Tash Semmens and Norma Hird, both of whom are also closely involved in a "feedback taskforce" and other teaching initiatives within Law. Hopefully we'll be able to have at least one representative from Law at each of the meetings going forward.

Getting Started: introductory meeting - Social Sciences

This afternoon Tim and Willy hosted the launch event for the hub project. Some reflections on the event as a whole will follow soon, but for now I wanted to share some discussion points from our second activity. For this part of the session we split up into faculty groups and Alan Philips (Student Services), Richard Ward (LeTS) and I became honorary Social Science bods, along with Steve Wise (Geography) who is the ‘real thing’!

1. Topics that would like MASH to cover
The top priority (for Geography) is writing skills for ‘home’ students, from grammar through to how to structure and present a coherent argument (no pressure on me then for the rest of this posting).

In terms of existing resources, the department has looked at materials produced by the ELTC. Whilst these are excellent, they have largely been produced for an ESL audience, so they require some modification to make them suitable. The Royal Literary Fund (RLF) has also produced material designed for HE level study that we should explore further. In addition, the RLF writing fellow based in Animal and Plant Sciences has highlighted the benefits of 1-1 support and advice. With this in mind, we agreed that it will be worth exploring peer support, e.g. level 3 students working with level 1, as part of the TASH project.

There was a consensus in the group that in order to be effective, the resources need to be contextual. Therefore role of TASH should be to provide generic material and examples that departments can adapt to meet their own requirements.

2. Challenges
Student expectations and engagement -the student survey highlighted a gap between what departments offer/deliver and what students recognise has been provided. We discussed how this relates to the process of learning and reflection – how can we better support students in developing the critical self reflection skills that can help them to process and evaluate what they have learned and translate this into what they need to do next?

Related to this, we also considered what motivates students to engage with academic skills development. Whilst ‘getting a better degree’ has some appeal, we also agreed that employability and transferable skills are often of equal, or higher, significance. In both instances, we agreed that peer perspectives can be as or more powerful than those of tutors, and it could be useful to have some level 3 or recent graduate perspectives on ‘what I wish I’d known’. In addition, whatever the format or mode we use to provide skills development, we need to recognise that the relevance and importance attached will vary from student to student, and with this in mind, it is important that there is a resource /resources that enable students to revisit things at a time that works for them.

Designing materials that suit student and tutor requirements – it would be great to have parallel access points for tutors and students, but given the previous points it will be a challenge to design generic materials for students that can augment or serve as a prompt to go back to any materials or activities that were provided by their department/s. However, if (or should that be when) we can get this right , it will be a real strength.

In terms of contributing to the TASH project, Steve noted that he would like to work on 'writing skills' in collaboration with the ELTC and LeTS, with a view to sharing materials via the Hub.