This has been a long day - leaving home at 0800 and returning at 2130 without a proper break.  One of the main tasks (self-imposed) was to spend 4 hours in revision tutorials with students taking my final year option class (GEO323 Social Geography of Europe) who are coming up to their examination on 5 February - the last day of the examination season. (That will actually put me and my fellow marker, Frans Schrijver, under some pressure to complete our marking against a tight departmental deadline.)

Final year Geography students undertake a 40 credit research dissertation, handed in also on 5 February.  The existence of this 40 credit block means that they only take one taught module during the first semester of their final year.  Although there is one-to-one supervision for the dissertations, many students go through whole weeks without seeing their supervisor.  Such students have thus only had 3 hours per week of staff contact time throughout one semester - which I regard as too little.  The vast majority of students need more structrue in their working lives than is provided by a three-hour class on a Friday afetrnoon (which is when my option has been running).  With a class of 24, Frans and I have been using a variety of methods to seek direct engagement with the students, and to encourage peer and group learning.  We have been using the facilities of CILASS Collaboratory 3 (in Bartlomé House) and students have been asked to do different things each week, including searching and analysing statistical databases of European social survey results; developing a joint wiki on a key topic; holding a political debate; producing designs for web sites; and making 'old-fashioned' Powerpoint presentations.  All of these things go down very well, and in the formal evaluation in December the module scored very highly on student satisfaction.  But the level of real individual discussion possible was limited and accordingly I offered, as an experiment, to create a series of tutorial sessions (maximum 4 students per session) to help students hone their skills in structuring arguments.  I was also aware that because of the timing of the exam students would have no staff contact for around 7 weeks prior to it taking place.  The sessions on offer were quickly filled up and I have had to create extras.  Hence I have now embarked on what will be around 12 hours of such tutorials over the next two weeks - with 4 today.

What is dismaying is how little opportunity the students have had to engage in real discussion in this relatively intensive fashion.  It is chastening to see how grateful they are to be given this chance.  The acuity of understanding and vision varied between groups, but in all cases there was real participation, and a willingness to chance arguments and see where they might run.  For me there was also the opportunity to have my own views challenged and new questions posed of my understanding of topics that have been central to my research and teaching for years.  One of the huge benefits to active researchers seems to me to be in participating in discussion with students who challenge us to see things in different ways.  My own sewn-up perceptions of key issues have often been taken apart in this way and I have then had to reassemble them in new ways, generally after some more gathering of evidence and an extended period of reflection.  I don't think that happened today, but it may well do over the next couple of weeks.

Another major task today was to chair a brainstorming meeting of the Admissions and Outreach Sub-Committee around what the university's undergraduate bursary offer should be in the future.  We decided our current bursary structure in 2005, before the introduction of deferred fees, and much has changed since.  In 2005 we decided to offer 'achievement bursaries' for those with the best A level grades - and to do so differentially so as to try to attract students into subjects such as Engineering, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Archaeology, and Information Studies - subjects which at the time were not recruiting well.

But one effect of this 'bribe' (as it was called by some at the meeting) to take certain subjects has been that we have been paying bursaries to a number of students from wealthy family homes (and not just to those from widening participation backgrounds, as is theoretically supposed by the terms of our Access Agreement).  The Student Union Council has recently put on record its opposition to these bursaries to priority subjects on the grounds that they are divisive.  Demand is now buoyant in subjects where 5 years ago it was stagnant, and arguably there is now no need for such targeted bursaries.

After a wide-ranging discussion it was agreed that we need to do some modelling of alternative scenarios.  One would be to provide a low level achievement bursary for all students from low income households - irrespective of the subject they come to study.  Another would be to scrap all bursaries other than our main income-contingent bursary and then raise the levels of that. 

We need to make some headroom because we have decided that next session we will introduce a busrary for students from low-income households taking postgraduate taught programmes.  An issue that has been recently highlighted by various reports is that many such students set off along the undergraduate degree that will lead them to entry to a profession such as the law or town planning, but then cannot go beyond the undergraduate stage of training because no financial support is available for the postgraduate course that is essential for accreditation and a relevant graduate job.  Introducing bursaries for such students will obviously increase costs, and we want to rationalise undergraduate bursaries accordingly.

Readers of this blog post may like to add their own comments on these issues.