I met with Academic Support lecturer Matthew Phull to discuss his role as the specific Academic Support person embedded with Culture & Enterprise and Spatial Practices. I was first acquainted with him at the WDWTWA conference, where he heard the Lightning talk Poojitha and I gave.
I began by trying to understand his role and how it fits into the larger university structure and what it meant that he worked with C&E and Spatial Practices. He explained that Academic Support functioned a bit as a way to fill in holes that there might be in courses by working with courses and offering 1-1 tutorials and workshops. He has been in the role for a year, and is part of an expansion of the Academic Support team, bringing the total number of lecturers embedded with courses to 8 from the previous number of 2.
He said he worked primarily with the two BA courses – BA CCC and BA Architecture with a combined student size of around 300. He said that he was stretched fairly thin in his role. As I asked him some more fundamental questions about Academic Support and who 1-to-1 tutorials were for, he was surprised that I didn’t know as course leader Richard Reynolds (his boss) is the joint-head of Academic Support. He said they hadn’t prioritized giving introductions in Applied Imagination because they assumed Richard would introduce it. He said that to differentiate from course content, he would prioritize giving an introduction in the future.
We also discussed that Academic Support doesn’t have information pages for the people involved, so when there are bookable tutorials, it’s not clear who they are with or why students would book them. He expressed that this would indeed be a good thing to have. It led to a discussion of how students have very little access to information even about other students or how to access anyone.
Because he has some leeway for personal projects in his role and his background in philosophy, Matt is thinking about starting a Reading Group open to students in C&E and Spatial Practices, which I encouraged. He was interested in my role as School Rep, covering the programmes he works with, and we said we would stay in touch as the role developed.
I asked if there would be scope for me to partner with Academic Support for some of the issues I’m interested in addressing, especially as my argument that Social Learning is a key component of academic success. He said that definitely I could probably host or co-host a workshop, and that I should talk with Head of Academic Support Graham Barton, who I have a meeting scheduled with next week. This gives me scope to consider before I meet with him.
Matt reflected, like Vikki, how nice it was to hear about a student’s experience with the system he works with. This has led me to think about this university system being set up to serve students but in such a decentralized, disjointed way that there is no one going through to understand what the experience of going through this system is like for a student/user.