Researching, Advancing, and Inspiring Student Engagement (RAISE)
Last Wednesday, I attended the Researching, Advancing, and Inspiring Student Engagement (RAISE) 2018 conference at Sheffield Hallam. It was a really nice space, full of interesting people, many of whom were working in roles that sit somewhat askance within conventional university structures. Some were academics doing fun stuff, like the Student Observation of Teaching (SOOT) project I was there to talk about; some were professional services staff, either working directly in student engagement, or in roles where it was clearly beneficial; and, as you might imagine, there was also a strong showing of students, talking about their experiences and research. I was delighted to be co-presenting my paper with Charlie Heywood-Heath, an undergraduate student in the Sheffield Methods Institute who did himself, his department, and the university proud.
This notion of “student engagement” is sometimes a tricky one to pin down, but in essence, it is about empowering students to take more of an active role within their education. This includes both enabling them to learn in ways that give them more responsibility, autonomy, and agency; and including them within the democratic structures of the university, so that decisions that impact on students’ experiences, clearly include students as stakeholders within the process. Both of these angles fit pretty well with the SOOT project, where students and staff were partnered to have a conversation about teaching and learning in higher education. Within this, I hope students felt empowered not just to think about how learning happens within university programmes, but also to imagine ways in which it might be better, perhaps both for the member of staff with whom they were partnered, and for their home department more broadly.
RAISE as a network began as just 4 people in 2009 and has grown substantially since then, making the conference a very friendly and welcoming space (and, conference organisers please note, with an emphasis on affordability — £20 per day as a student presenter rate, which definitely helped bring in a more diverse range of participants and added to the quality of the conversation). Our paper went very well, with a really positive feeling in the room, and it was good both to get a sense of how what we’ve done was similar to projects elsewhere, and the capacity for learning from others who might have been doing this better and/or for longer. The poster we took to the conference is here, and the slides to which we talked are here, and my thanks go to Research Committee for their financial and practical support in enabling Charlie and I to attend. The issues the conference explored of student empowerment and autonomy will only become more pressing in an era of TEF, and it’s welcome to think that through the RAISE network, there are interested and interesting practitioners already doing exciting things to push things forward.
#raise18
Tim Herrick is Director of Learning and Teaching at The School of Education, University of Sheffield.
