2026 Conference - Student Voice in Learning and Teaching: what is possible?

Good morning, everybody. Hi. It felt like it was an appropriate lull for us to get started. So my name is Lucy Evans, and I'm Associate Principal and Deputy Secretary Students. I'm really proud to lead learning teaching and student experience for the university, along with incredible mix of colleagues from across the university. So I'm here to give you a very, very warm welcome to the University of Edinburgh's Annual Learning and Teaching Conference. I'm just going to start with some housekeeping. So I'm just going to read this because I need to make sure I've got it right. So we're delighted to welcome not only our in person delegates, all of you here, thank you very much, but also those of you joining online through our live stream channels. For the breakout sessions, some rooms will have a maximum capacity, so spaces are first come first serve. There will always be room in Oak and Larch lecture theatres. So if you can't get into a room, please find your way to Oak or Larch. And the sessions held in Oak and Larch will be live-streamed. Please, please wear your lanyard all day so that catering staff know that you're part of the conference. If you have any questions or queries, please ask colleagues in the blue T shirts, go to the registration desk, or if you're online, you can access the support line on the team's channel. The conference is all day, and I hope you're able to join us for today. It also includes a networking opportunity at 5:00, which is on the first floor, which includes ice cream, perfect for the weather but apparently it's supposed to get warmer, so we'll hold on to that. Ice cream, soft drinks, and delegates are also welcome to then gather in the EUSA Mayfield bar, which is next door open five till 8:00 P.M. For delegates. So that's the housekeeping done. Just a brief welcome from me because I know you want to hear from many, many other colleagues. But I really wanted to say this is an event that I look forward to every year because it's always such a positive and vibrant event where we can press pause on the everyday, reconnect with colleagues we know, meet new colleagues, and have the opportunity to learn a vast array of exciting and innovative work taking place across the university in education and student experience. I personally have really been excited about this year, given the topics we're focusing on student voice and asking what is possible. For those of you that have heard me talk before about the fundamental priorities at the university to our work in terms of enhancing and improving student experience, student voice is something that I talk about all the time, if not the most, but certainly one of the most important to do that. Student voice underpins the student experience through creating a sense of belonging, agency, and value. We have so many examples here that we're going to hear about today that highlight the outstanding nature of our students and the huge value added by their perspectives and contributions. We've been striving for years to ensure that we listen to students feedback and to what they wish to tell us, but student voice is much more than listening. Although it is about listening, student voice is not about one way communication. Listening is important and what we'll hear today about the importance of hearing and responding, acting on student feedback and communicating regularly with students about what we do and why we're doing it. We will also hear about the transformative potential as much deeper and wider student involvement in teaching, learning, and student life. And to that, I'm going to pass to my colleagues, Ash and Callum, who are going to talk through a bit more detail about what that means. Thank you. Hello. It's working. Okay, it's so good to see so many of you. This is absolutely packed, which is wonderful and for a topic that obviously we all care about so much, so it's really lovely to see you. Also, with everybody online, I can see your lovely pictures on screen here, so it is good to see you as well. I'll give you a wave. And yeah, it's so lovely to have such a packed room about this topic. So, I'm Callum. I'm the Design Lead on the student voice project at the university. My name is Ash, and I was the EUSA president up until last week. So 2025/2026, and it's lovely to be here and see so many of you that I've met before and that I haven't met before. So as Lucy has kind of alluded to, student voice is a huge priority for the university. Now, there is good reason for that. There's no point in sugarcoating it. We don't do particularly well in student voice in a lot of areas, notwithstanding all of the amazing work that's going on by people in this room. I am not going to chuck a load of numbers up on the screen because I think we need to think about this much more fundamentally. If you are interested, we're towards the bottom of the Russell group, bottom of Universities UK. But student voice saw the biggest increase in the NSS themes last year, and that is down to what everybody in this room is doing. So there is progress. There's some good work going on. But thinking more fundamentally, students are the majority of our community at the university, by far, they outnumber us as staff. And they're spending a lot of their years here, really formative years. They've got ideas. They're spending their time figuring out what they think about the world, what they think about themselves. And then, whether it's because of bridges systems, entrenched culture, just the disconnects, the university being slow to catch up to what it means to be a student in 2026. We don't always ensure that they have their realistic but also their metaphorical seat at the table. So our team recently, and I can't see Alex, but I will shout out Alex for pulling this out, we were looking at comments from the postgraduate taught experience survey, and there was a few that stood out around this theme of student voice. So the first one was surveys are done in a very clunky manner. Fair enough. I think we all agree there's some room to improve. We can fix clunky, though. That's easy enough. Some of them spoke to some cultural issues that were a bit deeper. So someone said feedback is treated as a personal offence. And I'm sure we've all witnessed that in classrooms, in course feedback, even just dialogue 1-1. Sometimes it doesn't feel very great, even if it's done with the best of intentions. The one that was horrific, though, with warning was someone said, Students are to be seen and not heard. Pretty devastating, I sure will agree. And I think one student saying that is obviously too many when we're trying to be open, have that dialogue, and build those relationships with our students. I don't want to bum you out. On the flip side of that. When we get it right, one student said, I have a voice, and it feels like we're shaping the trajectory of the course and what we're learning. Now, that's the goal. But when I was reading that, there's an interesting little quirk of language. I have a voice, and it feels like we're shaping the trajectory of our learning. So it gets into all of these discussions about belonging, mattering, being part of a community, and that's sort of just a subconscious thing that that student has brought into that comment. So I've seen in works in those environments where students, staff value their kind of unique perspectives, their contributions, whether it's on their subject, whether it's on the hot topic of the day, whatever that may be, even on the sort of art of learning and teaching itself. And it has so many benefits. And when we don't have that kind of empowered, respected, strong student voice, we get into that domino effect of lower engagement, that sort of consumer relationship that a lot of us recognise. We get into losing a sense of belonging, feeling that you don't matter in the classroom. And just a really deep disconnect between staff and students, which I'm sure we all agree is not great. And I think we're all the worse for it. And from the perspective of a student coming into these spaces, I have to agree with some of these comments. It does often feel like when I came into this role that I'm the token student in the room that I go into. So people well meaning will ask, What do students think about X? What do students think about housing? What do students think about AI? What do students think about this and this and this? And while this is very well meaning, and I'm happy to give some answers, and we have a lot of insight at the Students Association, We also don't have the answers to anything. I don't have the answers to everything. And it doesn't kind of replace everyone going out and asking their students that they interact with. Secondly, as Lucy was saying earlier, there's a huge gap between listening to student voice and actually acting on it. Whenever I'm whenever I was in spaces at the university, I do feel listened to. I feel like people have like students' best interests at heart, and I'm taking seriously. But often I don't get a tangible action out of it. And if I'm feeling that as the president of the Students Association, well, guess how every student in every classroom feels. I there are so many people that care about student voice at the university and beyond, and they care about student experience that have our like their best intentions at heart. But we are not great at closing that feedback loop to students. And guess what? If students feel like they're not being heard and not being listened to, either they will stop engaging, and it's about it and then you go into this question of, like, Oh, but students aren't engaging with me, or students get really frustrated and find other ways to engage, like getting involved in occupying a building, for example. So think about that. So if we're not engaging with students in this manner that is well meaning and really action oriented and genuinely meaningful, then we will lose these students into either of those two directions. So Before we go any further, we're going to do an activity, which is very exciting to get you all going in the morning. And I want you to speak with the person next to you, whether you've met before or not, and speak with them and ask yourself, why did you come here today? So really think about why. Is it to learn something? Is it to make a plan to try something new or something else? Don't say free lunch, though. I will hear it and I will call you out. Wait until the deb off you can Okay. All right. All right. Thank you, everyone. That was loud and nice and energetic. Like this is great for almost like nine something am. As a student, I wouldn't have been able to do that. So whatever your reason was for why you were chatting to someone else, hold that in your mind as you go through today and really be critical about your own kind of standing here in the room and also about kind of the reasoning for you to come here today. Yeah, that was insanely loud. Thank you. So, I think, as Lucy said, we're going to hear a lot of really interesting stuff today from our colleagues, whether they're really big scale projects, whether they're individual classroom things or even just one to one activities. And a lot of that is really exciting and really innovative. And I think what we were struck by when we were looking at the programme is just the sheer breadth of where this stuff is coming from. It is from everywhere. I think it goes to show that student voice and all of these kind of related themes they can apply right across the university, which is really, really exciting. Before we get to that, a little bit about why we're here, I guess. So from a university perspective, what are we doing on student voice? So the project that I lead the student voice Project launched about a year ago in response to a baselining out size. So that looked right across the university, all of the student voice activity that was going on. And the big things that that threw up there was a big lack of clarity who should be doing what they should be doing, when they should be doing it, all of those roles and responsibilities around student voice because it's a term that means something different to different people. It also found this sort of lack of consistency, particularly as Ash said, about responding to students, closing the feedback loop. We did some analysis internally of one feedback mechanism, and something like 80% of the actions didn't actually have a sort of clear route to do something with, and that obviously feeds back to students as well. And the other thing was a bit a skills gap in sort of both sides. On students side, giving constructive feedback because it is a skill. You need to learn it. It's not something that you're necessarily born with, but also on the flip side, in the analysis of the feedback, pulling out the key things and that key part, responding back to students in a way that is respectful but also honest and doesn't just sort of lead to this breakdown of that loop that happens all too often. So what we've done so far is focusing on foundations and infrastructure. So in the past couple of months, we have passed and approved our new student voice charter and framework. Together, they outline sort of high level principles and a process that student feedback should go through. And it's what we're aiming for. So what that is talking about is having really open communication between staff and students, co creating actions, making sure that we actually then do something with those actions and don't just leave them on a list. Closing the feedback loop, being honest about what we're changing, also when something can't change, making sure that students understand why that is and not just compute says no. Okay. Also, reflecting on progress is a really key part of that cycle. It's one thing to do in action. It's another thing to go, like, did it actually work? Did it resolve the problem? Is there further that we can go? And we know that the university and Scottish higher education are all this big focus on enhancement and really making sure that's built into these processes as well. And then the other thing slightly controversial for some in this room, is that we've passed a new student staff liaison committee policy and a new approach to action logging at a central level. And the whole point about that is to bring a level of consistency, allow loads of flexibility for schools to do it in a way that makes the most sense for you. But making sure that we're surfacing some of these shared issues, shared actions, but also shared solutions, it's quite hard on a big university to do that with 25 plus individual schools are operating in their own way, but it's a start, and it's what we're trying to achieve. That's going to launch in September, if anybody's wondering. And there's a lot more to come. The project is absolutely huge. There's loads of stuff on the list that we're looking at. But the key point is that we're trying to enhance what's working and fix what isn't wherever we can. And ultimately, what we want to do is make sure that all students can use their voice whenever they want to. And obviously, it goes the same. We're not doing that alone. I see so many faces in this room that I speak with really regularly that we're working together, but also obviously really closely working with US, as well. And yes, as we kind of have been saying this morning so far, sometimes students don't want another survey. We did a mapping exercise last year, and at one point in October, there were seven surveys open for students or supposed to be seven surveys open for students to fill out with emails, reminders, and every single day, we got a new reminder of a new survey to do, and just that doesn't sometimes work for us. So at the Students Association, we asked ourselves this year, what can we do differently? What can we do that so students feel their voices being heard while it's also working for them. And we've done a democracy review, which is very exciting. And so please talk to my Students association colleagues in the room if you talk to them today about this. We had lots of student input via focus groups, one to one sessions, quick polls, and what we thought worked for students doesn't anymore. So many demands we have on our plates of students work, caring responsibilities, just workload in our university context as well. So you need to be critical when you're moving through today. Just because something worked when you were a student doesn't necessarily mean it still works today. And what can we do better? We've also done a lot of student outreach, so meeting students where they are. So we've actually done outreach here. Lucy and I have gone to the nucleus and actually talked to students during the lunch break. We've gone to the library. We've had kind of boards up where students could just put a sticker on for 2 minutes, chat to us, get a suite, be on their way. It's a quick two minute interaction that students were happy about because they didn't have to, like, fill out an entire survey or come to a focus group. But people that wanted to be more engaged, we also were able to get through things like roundtables where we could engage kind of quite active students and bring them into a room on eye level with senior university staff members and really have a deep discussion for an hour and a half, 2 hours with where we could go into depth about topics like exams or the degree awarding gap or university finances, all of these things. And we've also connected um kind of professional development with student voice. For example, designing a survey. What student can say that they've designed a survey while they were at the university besides maybe in their dissertation? Well, we joined together with student activists on gender based violence and designed a survey that was launched in January where we brought all of their feedback into the survey design and really were able to kind of bring all of that together. So I hope that you get inspired and challenged today because it's not just about students aren't engaging anymore, but have I tried every single thing and every single method that I kind of maybe get here to get inspired to today that meets the needs of my students? It's about action. And so I hope that you have some very, very good thoughts and conversations today with students, with colleagues and especially people you've never spoken to today. And as Callum said, as Lucy said, we want to encourage you to be critical. Question everything you hear today. Is it enough actually? Is it enough that someone's presenting on the next survey that they've done? Is it true partnership? Is it co creation? Is it truly what students need? And we will be looking at also this afternoon student panel, what is possible from a student perspective, what do students actually want. So get excited for that. And I hope you have a wonderful and lovely day at the conference. Thank you.

Extending these insights, I'm really pleased to welcome our keynote speaker this morning, Dr Emily McIntosh, with her talk, Nothing About Me Without Me. Which is part of our student voice and art of the possible. Emily is Chief Student Officer at Harper Adams University near Stafford is an acknowledged higher education leader with more than 18 years of experience in leading strategic change in learning, teaching, and student experience, curriculum development, and the student journey. She's previously worked at the University of West Scotland as Director of Student Success. She's a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a National Teaching Fellow. Wow, that's impressive. We are looking forward to hearing about Emily's experience in Student voice and gaining insights and inspiration for our work here at Edinburgh. So welcome, Emily. Hello. Okay. Good morning. Can everybody hear me? Excellent. Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. I am delighted to be here. I'm sorry I've brought the English weather with me, but it's lovely to be back north of the border. My name's Emily. I am Chief Student Officer at Harper Adams University. I've only been there for six months. Previously, as Lucy said, I was at the University of the West of Scotland for over three years, so I three and a bit years converting to Scottish money, and now I'm converting back. And let's just say, I think you're very lucky to be here in Scotland, and I'll say a bit more about that shortly. I just want to extend a massive thanks to Jenny and the team for inviting me here. I've had a wonderful time sort of talking about this keynote today, and I hope that what I say will resonate with you. And my role at Harper is new. I'm just getting to grips with what it is. I don't know if you know about Harper, but it's a rural higher education institution in Shropshire. We have our roots in agriculture. So it's really interesting to talk to our Agric students, and also we have veterinary medicine and other allied disciplines as well. So I'm getting to grips with a new role. I But before I begin talking about nothing about me without me, which is a little bit of a mantra that myself and my colleague, Helen may have had over the last several years, I just wanted to acknowledge that for many of the universities over the past few years have been involved in significant change and uncertainty and difficult decisions affecting colleagues and teams. I also know that when we talk about student voice, partnership and engagement, all these words that we use. It can sometimes feel that we are asking people to do more when there are people are already stretched. But what I want to say today is that listening to students isn't an additional task sitting at the top of everything else. It's one of the ways we make better decisions. It's one of the ways we can make a bit more effective use of our time and ultimately improve the experience of staff and students. So my keynote today is in three parts. Firstly, I'm going to talk about reframing the student voice from being heard to actually having influence, and thanks to Ash and Callum for their views on that. Really helpful. Secondly, I'm going to talk about how do we make this real, moving from those principles to practise. And then, thirdly, I'm going to talk about the art of the possible. So building cultures of partnership. So I will spend a few minutes setting the scene. Student voice isn't just about being invited to the party. It's being asked to dance and also being asked to choose the music. I want to start with a little story. I was speaking to a student not too long ago, let's call her Aisha. She told me about a meeting she'd been invited to a big one important people, Strategic decisions. She'd been asked to attend as the student voice, so she prepared for it carefully. She spoke to her classmates. She took notes. She walked in ready to represent. And then she noticed something. There was an empty chair at the table, not physically empty because every other seat was filled. But her chair, the one that was marked student voice, felt empty because every decision had already been shaped. Every direction already agreed, every option narrowed down. And when it came to her tone, she spoke. People smiled and nodded and thanked her. And when they moved on, afterwards, she said something that really struck me. I was heard, but I didn't matter. Now, that sounds like a very sad story, but it's a hopeful one because it ends well. I want to tell you how the story ends. A year later, Aisha was back at the same room, but this time, she hadn't been invited to respond to decisions already made. She'd actually been involved in the design. The agenda was different. The questions were different, and so was the outcome. At the end of the meeting, she didn't just have a voice. She had influenced an agency. And this time, she said, I wasn't just in the room. I was part of what happened there. The difference between being heard and being able to shape something is the difference between voice and partnership, and it takes time. It's the difference between paying lip service to student voice and this mantra, nothing about me without me. So that's what I want to explore today from representation to real partnership, from inviting students into our space to building those spaces with them, because nothing about me without me is not just a principle. I think it's a challenge to all of us to slightly rethink how far we're willing to go and to acknowledge starting small is the best way to begin. So some provocations. When was the last time a student really shaped something that you were part of, Bearing in mind that all of us, students included, are both time and resource poor? Do we talk about students? Do we talk at them? Or do we talk with them? What's the difference? This is something I've reckoned with in my own practice when sometimes it's easier to make a decision and then ask students what they think about it. I acknowledge these challenges are real, but I think it's not just about feedback, it's agency. It must exist within a widened student success ecosystem, which I'll talk about shortly. And I think what you're doing here at Edinburgh is fantastic because you are building the required infrastructure to support students in place. So nothing about me without me isn't just a slogan, it's a commitment. So how do we reframe the student voice? And I want to spend a few minutes thinking about why our context matters now more than anything else. The UK HE sector is awash with student success priorities at the moment. We've already heard quite a few of those words today, co creation, voice partnership, engagement. All of those are up for debate. The big one, and I'm really looking forward to this today is to get your perspectives on what belonging means because to me, it isn't about conforming. Belonging at an institution isn't about coming in and changing yourself to fit the norm. And that's something that I think is really important when we unpack what we mean by belonging. And student success remains in the international higher education space, largely undefined. And there's a gap. Because of the resource and time constraints, many institutions claim that they listen, but few share the power. So I think the reframing is really important about how do we reframe things slightly? And it's messy because it involves humans, and it involves expectations. And if we don't talk about those expectations from the beginning, the student voice will always be on the back foot. Because sometimes partnership is about holding the line. It's about disabusing students of some of the expectations they have when they join. It's about showing them the ways in which they can engage. But there's a tension there, isn't there, between that consultation piece and the partnership piece. Students don't want the seat at the table. They want to help design it, and that takes a long time. And student voice is a key part of that success. So I've been really fan girling this morning because I've met Cathy Bovill in person for the first time. And I've been following Cathy's work and the work of Peter Felton, and I know that he's spoken to you before at one of your previous learning and teaching conferences, so big, big pressure on me today. But Cathy's work is fundamental in this space. Relationships are the heart of student voice. Relationships are about dialogue. And for me, student success is not a journey. It's not a destination. It's a journey. And I think we've got to think about how we create a typology. So it's transitional. Students coming in at level seven, leaving at level ten. Back to Scottish money there. It's intersectional as well. What works for one student won't work for another. Yet, how do we reckon with that in a massified and diversified institution? So I've had a few goes with Peter, as well as part of a forum that he's set up. How do we define student success? And for me, and Ash talked about this earlier, student success is about the learner as an individual. So all of these words that I put together here for me help the definition of what student success is belonging, mattering, community, connection, expectations, and engagement. And I have a few provocations. So some of you may feel that there are more questions than answers after today's keynote, and that's deliberate to get you to think about things in a slightly different way. Do we talk about student successes in the plural? Do we talk about student experiences, and how does student voice fit? For me, student success is about the learner as an individual, with a specific educational legacy. Someone who is learning to think about themselves, Ash said this in relation to their subject, a person likely with multiple identities, with different expectations, with a different approach to learning as a cohort, and with their own roles and responsibilities. And what Scotland gets right for the student success, well, Your tertiary quality enhancement framework, the enhancement model in Scotland is fantastic. Transitions are very well intentioned here in Scotland as a pedagogical endeavour, not just points in the journey that you have to tick off. There's this national alignment around enhancement with the 19 institutions in Scotland and that focus through the QAA on partnership work. There has been now an emphasis on belonging and mattering and community. The belief in student success is relational, intersectional, and experiential, and it's not about outcomes, not always. And I think the good thing about the TQEF is that it actually promotes dialogic and compassionate pedagogies, enhancement front and centre. Whereas in England, and now I'm converting back to English money from Scottish money in the three and a bit years that I've been absent, that yet more regulation has been added. So I do think that being in Scotland is a good thing just now in sense of the way that that tertiary framing gives us a different toolbox and a massive shout out to the work of Sparqs, student partnerships in quality Scotland for the work that they've done in this space. Again, nothing about me without me. So framing the concept, what do we mean by authentic student voice? In Scotland, you've got the tertiary quality enhancement framework, and some institutions have already gone through their first tertiary quality enhancement review. You've also got the student learning experience model through Sparqs, which I think is internationally excellent. Even though it is specifically Scottish, I think it is internationally excellent in the student success space. Over 300 students participated in developing the SLE. It wasn't just a decision. The students designed it. They helped it. And so I think the questions that sit behind the student learning experience model are so useful to us in helping to shape that work. And I use it now. It's still informing the work that I am doing, and I'm taking a Scottish mentality to English higher education, I hope. I think I've got a colleague online today. She did say she was joining if she has, and she'll definitely tell me if I have or not. But this is a ladder. Students don't just come into HE straightaway thinking that they are empowered with a voice. So it does take time in order to support them to work with us in this way. So we go from informing to consulting, to engaging, to co creation to partnership, and that is what creates agency very slowly. There's a lot of work being done in this space at the moment with Simon Varwell who is at the University of the Highs and Islands, and Simon's wonderful. He's done a lot of work on what this ladder of participation means. And I think recently he spoke at the Scottish Principal Fellows Group. I wasn't able to be there, but he's done some great work in this space. And here we are. Here is a student learning experience model. I'm sure it's one that you're very familiar with. And behind each of these segments of the student journey lies 15 or so reflective questions that you can use to start designing with students some of the work in this space. And I'll tell you how my colleague, Sabina, at UWS and I have focused on this over the last we while. We also have the jigsaw, again, showing just how complicated some of these pieces are to get right. And again, because it's messy, there will be some wins, there will be some learning. But I think that some of the ways in which Sparqs have thought about the way in which student partnership is situated within the fabric of what we do is really useful. So enabling student voice. Students come in, they're in this mode at the bottom. Tell me, and I forget. So we have to keep retelling them, reiterating those really important welcome messages. What we want to get to is moving from that very transactional space through to that relational and dialogic space at the end there, where you stand by the side of students and you watch them lead. It's what I like to call teaching students to fish. So that they will support themselves for the rest of their career. And that is what student voice does in this space, really. Authentic student voice, student activism, the space that Ash occupies, the space that Callum occupies, the way in which we can move along this ladder upwards into that really genuine partnership space, which has to be predicated on that involvement, involve me and I understand what goes on here. And I think that was really helpful. So how can we reframe student voice through tertiary principles? So it's less about metrics, which is great because it's data informed in Scotland, not data led, and building a typology that recognises that these journeys are relational, transitional, intersectional, and also experiential, permission to experiment with ideas, see what works. And a lot of people talk about student success. You go on social media, you see all the trappings of success, but what you don't see behind that is how messy it is. All of the disappointments, all of the setbacks, all of the things that didn't quite go well in our own careers as well as in our students' lives. So we need to talk about those setbacks as ways in which successes are built upon. The student voice is really important to that. At the moment, my colleague, Michelle Morgan, is doing a project with Advanced HE over two years, and I'm sorry to say that Scotland is not involved in this one. However, UWS is doing some great work in the pre arrival questionnaire space, and Michelle has just launched their first report of the first year of 15 institutions participating in a national pre arrival questionnaire. And that's one way in which I think institutions can get ahead. It takes so long to get to know students. When you've got hundreds of students before you, how on earth can you get to know them in a personal way? It's not always about that. But I think if you can show and demonstrate that there's a student sat there in your lecture or your class, and you say, Well, 60 odd percent of you are feeling isolated or unsure about making friends at university, they feel seen. You're drawing on that information, and, yes, that it's a survey. Sorry to say. But in fact, when we shifted from a module survey to a being, becoming, belonging survey at UWS, we went from only 6% of students participating to over 23%. Because students were interested in the questions that we were asking them. They wanted to talk to us about belonging. Again, a national survey if you wanted to get involved in a very interesting thing that's being led by Harriet Dunbar Morris, who's shortly moving to Ireland. And again, participating in that is useful. So, again, more questions than answers. But given that we know that over two thirds of students are working, some of them full time hours, and the gig economy is the most successful at the moment, and we're constantly competing for students' attention and engagement, should we still be talking about the concept of the full time student when the challenge of student voice is even more difficult for us? Identity shapes about participation. Should we still talk about the co and extracurricular space where students don't have the time or money to participate in that bolted on rather than baked in model? How can we construct this relational and conversational culture that builds on the benefits of AI? And what if we designed that teaching for that uncertainty and not certainty? Failagogy, I think it's called. It has been called in the past. So how can we plan for this? There's lots and lots of different questions. And here is my view of what it's worth relationships are the new frontier for authentic student voice. It has to be authentic, not tokenistic. For me and Cathy's work absolutely backs this up. Relationships are the newest form of capital, especially when culture eats strategy for breakfast. Your student experience will never surpass the colleague experience. That's why it's so important to invest in colleagues to invest in students. Integrity and optics. Meaningful work in this area isn't fancy pants. It's lots of very brief, sustained, engaging conversations. So how do we move from that then to making those principles work in practice? I mentioned my colleague, Helen May. She was Advance HE a few years ago. She's always been interested in diversity in higher education. And again, we talk about co creation, which is inherently dialogic and supportive, but what makes up co creation and what do we mean about co creation? Helen and I did some work. It was published in 2024, but co creation is dependent on community. And again, you can't build a community overnight. It's built on cohesion, unity between members of that community and their collective endeavours, and also collaboration where two or more members of those communities come together working together. And I've got the heart in the middle of this because at the centre of the tertiary quality enhancement framework is a heart. High quality relationships and compassionate leadership, acknowledging that this work is hard. Streamlined policies and processes, that's the biggest bugbear of every student and colleague that I've met in higher education. Getting rid of the grit in the system that trips people up, anticipating and flagging those known trip hazards in the student journey, and also making sure that when we rebuild or amend some of those structures, they're inclusive and enabling. So I've got a couple of stories for you. Story one is about redesigning the curriculum. In that context, declining engagement, which is very common at the moment, a mixed feedback around relevance. So what colleagues in this space did was they developed a co creation group of staff and 12 diverse students reviewing the module content. They identified gaps and designed new assessment formats. What changed? The students helped design the project briefs, looked at diverse reading lists, collaborated in their learning, and the impact was quite stark. Engagement and attendance increased. Students reported stronger ownership of their learning, and staff reported more meaningful teaching conversations, and students were treated as expertise in their own experience. And students didn't just respond to the curriculum. They had agency and they helped build it. That said, students are a vintage, and no year is the same. So this will constantly change. Story two, shared decision making from a seat at the table to influence at it. What colleagues in this space did differently was redefined governance processes authentically to include students. They provided training and support for students in confidence, language, and systems, and for colleagues to support students in listening, power sharing, and constructive responses. And again, the impact was quite stark. Increased trust in representation structures, better decisions, as students felt their contribution had visible consequences. What made it work here was the transparency. Here's what changed the view. Students took responsibility. They had roles and responsibilities as well, and they were held to those roles and responsibilities. And it wasn't just symbolic inclusion. It was conversation. It wasn't just about giving them a voice. It was conversations to let the student voice lead change. And finally, story three, from a feedback culture, students aren't participants in market research, contrary to what HE does a lot of the time with surveys are plenty. And so we do. We rely too heavily on surveys, in my opinion. And I think the key now for us all in the sector is moving from this feedback culture, tell me what you think, tell me what you think, tell me what you think to that culture of partnership, which is much richer. So removing that reliance on surveys and student survey fatigue to actually shift that transactional feedback culture into a relational dialogic culture. Introducing regular partnership conversations. Again, student partnership for those things are really important. Embedded co creation moments in modules, encouraged everyday practises. I really hate you said we did. It's so tokenistic. I think we need to rethink all of that. So let's work it out together. Let's figure it out together. And what changed? Feedback became dialogic, ongoing and not episodic. So some of the responses and the results in the language shifted, too. Students were collaborators and not evaluators. They get to evaluate what they did with you, not evaluate what you did for them. Very different space. Stronger sense of belonging, reduced feedback fatigue, increased willingness from students to engage and contribute. And here is what made it work. Cultural consistency. It's not a one off initiative, visible responsiveness and trust built over time. So student voice stopped being stuff they collected and left in a dark drawer until quality assurance agency comes along and we bring in lots of different responses is actually something that was lived. You can see it everywhere. The commitment. You're all here today. Your commitment to students is fantastic. The conversations I've had in the last few days with your colleagues, I think there is a real shift now from representation to partnership, connecting stories like the ones I've just shared to a deeper system shift. It is to do this well, you will need the support of the system around you, and that has to change in order for you to do the work in this space. Challenge traditional models. Representation alone doesn't equal empowerment. I've got to have a voice in that. Building with students requires trust, transparency, and a willingness. And the model must emerge organically. Like I said, this will take three to five years to shift from a model of voice to partnership, to save time in the long run, and to help colleagues feel like they're making some change in this space. I'm very excited to hear what you're already doing and hope to be able to take away some of that into my own practise today, and I'm really pleased I actually get to spend the whole day with you all. But there are barriers, and I've got to be honest about this, honest reflection time. There are time and resource pressures. Institutional risk. Huge changes across institutions, not just individually, but in a sector way. We're all wedded to doing things in a particular way. There is some tokenism fatigue as well. I think we do need to think about why are we doing this. And also, what really does challenge me on a daily basis is unequal participation, designed for the majority, not the minority. And so I will question whose voice gets heard and how do we know And finally, all of this has to be reframed, and I'm doing this myself constantly. These are not reasons to stop. I think there are reasons to look at how we design these or how do we start to look at these design challenges to solve? So, part three, just a couple of things. The art of the possible, how do we build cultures of partnership? So this is the framework that Sabina and I built at UWS based on a long research project. On how we use two parts of the student learning experience model to look at the support we could put in place and chicken and egg, what comes first, belonging or engagement. We called it engagement. You have to engage in order to start feeling that sense of belonging. Community, belonging, representation, and partnership built on that idea of the ladder of participation over time. And we asked students the questions that are there in the student learning experience model. The questions that other students had already determined were the right ones to ask. And here is what's behind the scenes in the framework, and obviously, this is very specific to UWS and Sabina is still there working in the Students Association. But as we move from belonging and engagement at the top through to partnership, you can see how student voice is woven into the fabric of the student journey. Very happy to talk to colleagues about that in more detail if you're interested. And I'm trying to take that to Harper. So we're building an ecosystem, a student voice. And this week, Wonkhe and Evasys are publishing their student voice framework. I don't know if any of you will get the chance to attend. I'm hoping it will be recorded, but some national work has been done in that space over the last year, and they're launching the framework this week. It will be on the Wonkhe websites. And it's about all the building blocks we need in the sector to build this ecosystem. Coordination is massive. A survey of surveys. What else is going on and how many more surveys are students being asked to contribute to at any one time? And what I really like about it is the E word at the end, enhancement, not just assurance enhancement. Looking at there will be impact and outputs in this area. Yes, we need to be able to show what we're doing works. But actually, it's around inputs, how we couch those conversations in the curriculum with the surveys, and how we get to test out some of those ideas in practise. So some practical takeaways. Start small, co create one module or initiative, one conversation at a time. Think about pre arrival questionnaires, shift the language, and replace feedback with dialogue, starting with welcome interactions, induction interactions, set the scene, redesign structures, and this is a systemic thing. Give students real influencing committees, train staff and students in partnership. And it's not just about training because colleagues have so much experience in the space, and so do students. It's about bringing those people together. But measure what matters. What counts can't always be counted? And what can't be counted sometimes counts. Really important to think about the qualitative here, too. So we return to the original story. We go back to Asia. What changed when voice became partnership? Nothing about me without me isn't an aspiration. It's a responsibility. The question now is no longer if we involve students, but actually how far we're willing to go together. And nothing about me without me becomes real when we actively build systems where students co create. So student voice isn't something we invite in, it's something we build with. And then when we do it well, it doesn't just change decisions, it changes who belongs in the story. Thank you for listening.

Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us for this first one of our breakout sessions in the Larch room. My name is Lauren Harrison. I'm the Senior Academic Experience Manager sitting within AQS. So we're going to have three presentations, some of which will be from participants online, some of which will be from participants in the room. And after the three presentations, we'll then have a group Q&A. So anyone who is in the room with us will be able to ask questions to any of our presenters, whether they're online or in person. So myself and my colleague Olivia will be running around with microphones to facilitate that. But we'll go through the three presentations first. And starting with our first one, which is co creating inclusive digital spaces, amplifying student voice in online learning. Now, this will be delivered by some of our colleagues online, so I will hand over to Megan and let yourself and your colleagues introduce yourselves as you begin speaking. Thank you very much. Lovely. Thank you so much. Can I just check that you can hear me? All good. Lovely. Thank you so much. And I'm just seeing. I see Edgar is online. Hello, Edgar. We might still be waiting on some of our co presenters, but just in the meantime, Edgar, are you happy to help navigate the slides and let us know when it's time to change the slides? Hey, Megan, I think they're already there. I'm not sure. I'm not sure I saw them. No, do you see the slides? They're up on the screen? Yes, I'm not sure I can be able to move it forward. No, that's fine, but you can just let us know when it's time to change them. Perfect. And then can I just see Phila? Do we have you as well? Phila might not be here. And Jenny, Hmm. Okay. Hopefully they're able to join. They might be having some technical difficulties. I'm not sure. But in the meantime, Edgar, you and I can deliver the presentation. So, Edgar, are you happy to start? Sure. I think I'll just use my audio. My camera is not on, so I'll just audio, is that okay? Sure. Great. All right. So our presentation is on co creating inclusive digital spaces, amplifying student voice in online learning. Online learning, students may struggle with a sense of connection and belonging. And this requires intentional design to create a sense of belonging. By ensuring their approaches are participatory and will place students as co creators in the learning environments. With an increase in higher education and online distance learning, it is important that we generate a sense of belonging and engagement among the online students. So this presentation draws on experiences from different courts. We did the Mastercard Scholarship programme at the University of Edinburgh, and it bring together staff staff and online students in a reflective tone in how we can create a meaningful spaces in the digital learning environments. The presentation will use two case studies. One, a co-created set of programme values, and two, a co-created WhatsApp code of conduct as examples to show how we can include on the learning environments, development through collaborative planning processes to position African best students as partners in programme design and delivery rather than just passive recipients. Next slide, please. Megan, Megan, muted. Thanks, Edgar. So before we go on to the case studies, we'll provide a bit of context for who we are. So all of the co contributors of this paper, including so we had Michael Gallagher and Inga Ackerman, as well, who, unfortunately, were not able to be there in person today. But all of us are students or staff affiliated with the University of Edinburgh's Mastercard Foundation Scholars programme. The Mastercard Foundation has been working in partnership with the University of Edinburgh since 2016, and 2023-2030, it will offer postgraduate scholarships for 850 African students, many of whom are online distance learners, meaning they are physically located across Africa, but are pursuing predominantly online master's or PhD degrees at Edinburgh. And programmes that are represented today from the co contributors are the Digital Education Practitioners Network, the Masters online master's level online Distance Learning Scholars Programme, and the Wits-Edinburgh Sustainable African Futures doctoral programme. So I'm happy to share a little bit about our approach, and then perhaps Edgar, if you want to go into the first case study. So for this presentation, we're less concerned about questions of access to digital education and more interested in the learning processes that are just and centred on co creation. Co creation can foster belonging and ease power imbalances between learners and educators, and Fons et al, and we'll have a slide with all the references as well, argue that successful digital education overcomes structural barriers through collaboration across support networks, including administrators such as myself. I'm the coordinator of the West Sf doctoral programme, educators and students like Edgar. And the feminist framework offered by care ethics, and we referenced Noddings and Toronto exposes how market driven approaches can widen care inequalities. And these are inequalities that were really deepened during the COVID 19 pandemic when many universities falsely assumed that empathetic practises would just organically transfer into online spaces. And they don't always. Edgar, do you want to share the first case study? For sure. All right, thank you, Megan. We draw our lines from previous University of Edinburgh Masto Scholars programm. And the WSA programme, leadership that is yeah, that side, yes. Thank you. Actually, it is important to form. Sorry, Edgar. I think Phila is here. Phila, are you here? Yes and again, I'm here. Hi, Phila. Hi. Would you like to sorry because the first case study was the Westaf case study as you're a Westaf fellow, would you like to share this case study? Yeah, yeah, yeah, certainly. Thank you for that. Greetings, everyone. I'm Phila from South Africa, a fellow currently pursuing a joint PhD programme with vets, as well as the University of Edinburgh. Well, in terms of the co created values, perhaps it is important to mention that these are co created values. They are not some sort of a a top down approach. We met as with fellows in our first sustainability school in South Africa. Then we had to chunk a way that will be more suitable for us that will reflect our own community. And then the values that we co created. Can you just move the next slide, please, so that I can Yeah. So it was predominantly based on listening to the other fellow, and then we co create those values. We reflect. Next slide, please, so that I can talk a bit about those values. So co creating values, the values that we co created as with our fellows, one, it is based on integrity, collaboration, inclusion, effective communication, positivity, as well as well positive well being. So the collaboration part of it or the significant part of these values, particularly the collaboration that speaks about the teamwork, I mean, we are scattered all over African countries, but we do create some online spaces wherein we can collaborate while also reinforcing issues of accountability, the collective ownership, and also noting that given that we are online, we also spoke of respect and inclusion, as well as effective communication within the online spaces that will ensure that no one is offended by whatever thing that is posted or whatever. Can you go to the next slide, please? So part of the values that we co created, as I've just mentioned, it is centred around issues of collaboration, respect, commitment, and so on. But more importantly, is to mention that as and when we have our sustainability schools in South Africa recently, we had one in agra. So we do take an opportunity to reflect on these values and ask each fellow to adopt one value that they think they will best live within the sustainability. And then as we draw towards the end of the sustainability school, We sub coordinators, as Dr Megan has mentioned, they create a space for us again to reflect on how best we have lived these values not only in person, but as well as transporting them to our online digital spaces. Thank you so much. I think my part ends here. Thank you, Phila. Mm hmm. Next slide, please. Great. Onto our case study two, I'm Edgar from Nairobi, Kenya. I'm an online scholar, and WhatsApp for us is an informal, yet very important space because this is where we receive announcements, questions, celebrations, and even offering peer support. So much of the programme, as much as it's being run via email, really happens here on WhatsApp. And as our own community grew, we recognised the need to have shared expectations around how we communicate, how we engage with one another. So instead of treating WhatsApp as simply a messaging platform, we saw it as a space to create learning, connection, and belonging. So together, students and staff, we developed a code of con that emphasised the values of respect, privacy, participation, and consideration for the different contexts because we are from different backgrounds, and even the different time zones. And more importantly, we have created a shared understanding of how we want to engage as a community. The impact has gone beyond the document itself. It has helped create clear expectations, it has encouraged more thoughtful engagement, and even contributed to a stronger sense of community. We have had activities like playing cahoot from the different time zones, playing scaage hunt in the GTA group, sending gifts and memes and informal check ins where success was not because they were fun, but because they took place in a shared space with shared norms and executing mutual respect. So in many ways, the code of conduct became the practical expression of the shared values that we sought to achieve. And these helped turn the subgroup into a community that was just guided by thoughtful and co created an im massive code of conduct. Next slide, please. Megan, will you take this off? Absolutely. Question. Yeah. Thank you, Edgar. So just very quickly because I see our time is coming to an end, but I thought I would touch upon some of the challenges and tensions that have arisen. While co creation offers potential benefits for fostering a sense of belonging among online students, its implementation, of course, is not free from challenges. It does demand significant time and resource investment from both staff and students. Um, so, for example, the process of co designing programme values that Phila spoke about, among the Westaf fellows, it really benefited from in person gatherings. And this, of course, requires large financial investment to enable the fellows and the staff to travel from Edinburgh and from across Africa to physically be together. And as well, power dynamics between educators and learners can persist even within collaborative frameworks, and participation can still be uneven. Reflecting existing inequalities due to hierarchies of power and language and technological limitations. And Toronto claims that care is fraught with conflict. And with most of the communications taking place online, as well, bandwidth issues can hinder full participation for some of the scholars or fellows. And as well, without careful design co creation can risk becoming tokenistic and gesturing towards partnership, but still leaving structural and technological hierarchies intact. So the ethics of care framework that I mentioned before does not erase power asymmetries, but rather can reveal them, and hopefully they can then be addressed. Edgar or Phila, would one of you like to close? For sure I can close. Maybe next slide, please. Next slide. Yes, what we are saying in many words is that belonging in an online community does not happen by accident. It is built intentionally. Through the experiences that we've shown, students are treated as partners in shaping their learning communities, in creating trust, connection, engagement that can thrive. Despite the challenges that Megan has highlighted, genuine connection offers a powerful framework for fostering meaningful belonging at a distance. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you very much, Megan, Edgar, and Phila. I will now introduce our second presentation, which is listening, responding, connecting, building community in an online MSC programme. One. There you go. And it's a two. Charge? I charge. Yeah. I don't remember. Is the microphone still working? I'm just making sure you could come straight over so I could fix it. Hi there. Thank you all for coming to see us today. My name is Liz Colquhoun and I'm joined by Neil, and we work on the master's in Clinical Management of Pain Programme. And we're going to be talking today about listening, responding, and connecting. So just to give a bit of background to our project, we know that online learning has been described as convenient, effective, collaborative. Obviously, things moved on significantly through the COVID pandemic when online learning became more of a norm rather than a abnorm. However, our programme was one of the first online postgraduate programmes that was taught completely online. And We do know that the option of being able to study anytime, anyplace anywhere or as I like to think about the old Martini advert for anyone that was old enough to remember that is a useful thing, but we do know that that can lead to student isolation. It could also lead to disengagement. People are lost to follow up. They don't attend tutorials. They feel a little bit disenfranchised. So the lack of that traditional in person cohort can reduce the feeling of community within our cohorts and within our programmes. And this was borne out by recent well, previous PTS results, which highlighted that our community was an outlier for our figures. Our general figures were between 72.8 and 91. However, our community was down at 40, so we knew that we needed to do something about this. So just a bit more background about the programme. So it is a part time master's. It is delivered online. So it is asynchronous with some targeted live sessions on specific courses. So this, of course, offers great flexibility to our students who are the postgraduate. They are working. They have family commitments, they have caring commitments. But, of course, this is part of the challenge as well that we're talking about this morning. We have students from 15 countries around the world, any continent you can think of, apart from Antarctica, North and South hemisphere, and our students are from a wide range of professional backgrounds. We have dentists, anaesthetists, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists, and that's reflected in the teaching faculty as well. We come from a wide clinical background, and we have a wealth of clinical experience in pain management. So, as Liz was saying, we're talking about the community section of the PTS. So the community based questions first appeared in PTS in 2023. And the first round, you know, we got 69% in the score with, you know, maybe about a dozen students taking part. And then 2024, as has already indicated, this plunged to 42%. So it's certainly indicative of a change. And interestingly, when I was looking into this a bit more, the Office for Students looked for a 50% participation rate in P tests to be an indicator of reliability. Neither year did we reach that, but there were more students took part in the 2024 survey. So having listened to the keynote speaker this morning, I'm ashamed to say that we gave our students a questionnaire. We asked about their experience of being an online student, and I've popped a couple of their responses up. From a personal point of view, I've been an online student on a number of occasions. I've had very good experiences. I've had very poor experiences. I think some of that has to do with the cohort within which you are working. So I took my master's in pain management with a very strong community based cohort. I'm still friends with a lot of these people all around the world, 15 years on. I then took some postgraduate education through another university. Not this one, and had a very isolating situation. There was no community, there was no chat, and it really makes a difference to your experience of online learning. So I could kind of resonate with the comments that were coming back from our students from a kind of qualitative point of view. So not just the numbers, but the actual the feelings that were coming across, the feelings of being alone, that feeling of not having a sense of community, not knowing, you know, who to call on when you were feeling a bit stressed. It's all well and good that we give a lot of our kind of student support, which is great if it's a huge problem that somebody wants to bring up. If they just want a chat to say, you know what? I'm finding this essay really difficult. That community is really, really important, and it's the community that you would have if you were on campus and you said, Do you want to come for a cup of tea afterwards because actually, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed just now. And so it really resonated with me as a previous online learner. And, of course, we should ask, well, why is community so important? So it was great to hear from Callum and Anna for the student voice this morning. So, John Dewey, the educational reformer viewed learning as both a social and collaborative process, and moving forward to the online era, Richardson et al. suggested that having a good community, having a good online presence would improve student motivation, improve student participation, improve actual and perceived learning, and reduce dropout rates. And actually, they also found that it increased teacher satisfaction as well because we matter too. So if we look at the three questions on the slide, these are the three questions that you get in PTS if you're a postgraduate taught student. And it's that bottom question about having sufficient opportunities to interact with other students. That's the one that we felt as a programme we could most directly influence. And then perhaps if you can provide those opportunities, then you can improve that sense of community, can improve that sense of belonging. So as a programme, we listen to our students. We create opportunities that are factored in time zones, well being and inclusion. And we'll just move on to some of the results on the next slide. So we focused on three main options for interactions within our student cohort, all supported by all of our team, I should say, all of our programme team, not just by myself and Neil, we're just here as the spokespeople. So we looked at student centred virtual sessions, and these were really informal online sessions where we basically called it a drop in. It wasn't to necessarily discuss academic work, although if there was a specific issue, we could take that on and redirect. And it was to give a space almost like a coffee morning or a coffee evening just for people to say hello, for them to learn to get to know each other, to get to know us. I think we found it very useful to actually get to know our students a little bit better as well because as Neil has already said, it goes both ways. Our students don't know each other. We don't know our students as well when they're online. So it's nice to be able to have that time to say, was your day today? Where are you joining us from? What's the weather like with you? We've got very good at knowing a lot about Switzerland, haven't we? From a frequent flight. I support anybody but France. Yeah. France, she's on your team. But yes, we've really enjoyed the kind of virtual sessions, and they really allowed for that kind of informal space just to kind of catch up. We also set up a set of guest speaker webinars, and these were interactive topical webinars that were available not only to our students on our programme, but we opened them up to Well, what was the deanery at that point, but to the deanery and then to the wider university as a whole. We also offered them up to NHS colleagues, which again, gives that kind of idea of citizenship of spreading the word of what we're trying to do and actually put something back into pain management. Sessions usually had between about 50 to 80 participants, and they were a mixture between our students, as I say, and other members, which Neil will look at next. We had some hot topics. So some of the topics included effective adverse childhood events on chronic pain and chronic illness. We looked at pain management in the prison service. We looked at the gut microbiome. We looked at inequalities in chronic pain and service provision. So you can see it was a very broad church of the things that we offered. And we also asked for feedback after each of these sessions to get an idea of whether this is what our students and the wider population wanted to hear about or if there were other things that we could look at other topics. And it has been really useful because we did get some good feedback of topics to look at for coming years. We also put together a quarterly newsletter And this was kind of based on some of our oops, move that based on some information from our programme, important dates, research, particularly pertaining to pain management. We also had a kind of fun element, and especially around Christmas, we would have a Christmas quiz. We had a summer pain crossword last year, which I struggled with and chat GPT helped with. And yeah, we kind of gave a lot of in and kind of summer reading. Again, just to try and keep that kind of interaction going with our students. So those are the three community building activities that we focused on. And this is just from the survey for one of the guest speaker sessions that we recently had. So we actually had 96 registered participants. As you can see, the majority of them did come from the University of Edinburgh, but it was across all sectors. So we had some students from our own programme. We had students from undergraduate medicine. We had students from other programmes. We had postgrads, postdocs. We had staff, and we had quite a significant level of clinicians from the NHS, as well. So there was interest across all stakeholders, and I think this just again, it's about building the community, building engagement, and just making connections both within and out with the university. So our guest presenter feedback was good. Most people were satisfied with the webinar. Most people felt that it met their learning needs, and most people thought they would come back, and that's been borne out by the fact that we have frequent atttender through the sessions, and we can see that people even though this was done a couple of years ago now, we've gone into the following years, and we can see the same people coming back that they enjoyed it. And having that good response from the pilot year really encouraged us to put the time in because there is time and effort. It is extra to what you would class as the working day because we normally do them in the evenings. But it's really valuable, and I think it's really rewarding to see our students attending, but to see that kind of wider paying community as well. And this is just some of the feedback, again, from the students who came to the drop in sessions that we still keep on running. And I think it's just that again, the drop in what does community feel like as a student? You know, that's what we're trying to we were trying to capture some of that in campus experience So whether you call it, you know, coffee morning, fireside, water cooler. I don't know. I don't know community is kind of a warm and fuzzy feel that you get when you feel like you know you're part of a teaching faculty and part of a student community that are invested in and passionate about their subject. But I think that was, if we compare that to the previous year's PTS feedback, I think it's pretty positive. So I'm going to put up a little chart because no presentation is complete without a bar graph, really. But these are PTS results, and we're all kind of familiar with looking at the blocks. But what I just wanted to kind of evidence was to show that we have had a measurable increase in our community responses for the PTS results. That seems to be gratifying alongside what we've had is that kind of anecdotal feedback and the qualitative feedback. So asking after each of our inputs, you know, how did you define that? Was that useful? So getting those kind of immediate qualitative feedback, but actually then also seeing it in a measurable outcome has been really useful for both ourselves, but also moving forward, looking at different programmes as well as to how we can develop things. So some really big jumps on the previous slide there. And here, you'll see that actually, we had a 24.7% improvement. So what I think is interesting on this slide, if we go back to that Richardson paper that I mentioned, there's some benefits to student participation, student motivation, improvements in learning. Yes, we see a big jump in community, but we also see an improvement in some of the other areas that are evaluated. So has having these sessions, all the work that we've put in, has that actually led to the improvements in teaching and learning? Has that led to these increases engagement? You know what, even assessment management is, is there a correlation across these? I think it would be we don't know, but it's interesting to consider. Okay, so this is just our summary slide. I think our programme is a clinical programme. You know, is based in health. Health is fundamentally human to human interaction. And I think that we have worked hard to, like I said, these are qualitative questions, I think, community belonging, but to sort of generate opportunities to build the momentum, to get students to engage with these, I think, has been worth it, but it's definitely an ongoing piece of work. Absolutely. And I think that we were really pleased to be offered the place to speak here today to share what we had learned. And interestingly, I actually work across two programmes, and I took on a second programme role last year, and I'm now implementing some of the things that we did on the pain programme in a different programme because we found it so successful that I found the same problem in the next programme that I went to. So we're using some of the same options. Now, again, as our keynote speaker, Dr McIntosh said, students are a vintage. Each year is different. Each programme is different as well. So what works in one place won't necessarily work in another place. But it's worth, you know, having that knowledge in your back pocket and then being able to think, okay, how can I apply that to a different situation? What will that look like? So on behalf of myself and Neil, thank you very much for listening to us, and obviously, we'll have questions at the end after the last speaker. And we're also happy to chat. We've got a poster downstairs in the poster presentation on our project, and we'll be around at lunchtime as well, if anyone wants to catch up with us then. So thanks very much. Thank you very much, Liz and Neil. So our last presentation before we have some questions is Student perspectives in collaborative assessment in a global health virtual postgraduate course. I'll just give us a couple of minutes to reset because this is also online. Evelyn, are you sharing your own slides yet? Oh, I thought Olivia was going to share. I can share. Thank you. Can everybody, thank you. Okay. Great. Thank you. Well, thank you, everybody, and good morning or afternoon greetings from Granada, Spain, where I'm based. And on behalf of the Global Health Challenges course team, I'm pleased to share our experience of integrating student perspectives and student voices into a collaborative Wikipedia editing assignment. For this presentation in particular, I'm going to focus on the peer assessment component, but you'll see that my presentation has two parts, and I'll give you a good overview of what this Wikipedia editing assignment is as well. So just to get started with the context, the global challenges an introduction is fully online synchronous, 20 credit postgraduate course is part of the Global Health Challenges postgraduate certificate. Every year, we welcome a diverse international student cohort of about 25 to 30 students, which allows us to do a lot of small group one to one interactions with another tutor and the course organiser myself. It is a core course of the certificate, but it's an elective that other programmes can choose to join. We have usually a mix of online and in person programme. This is important because of what we've been talking in the previous presentation about the community. We have two communities, those that are an in person programme in Ningbra and those that are fully online, and then but all the interactions are meant to be online. So for that peer assessment part of what I'm going to discuss today. We focus specifically on planetary health and health inequality. But our overarching goal with this course is that students apply a critical global health perspective to real world challenges. And they do this through student engagement, inclusive knowledge production, and this is where the assignment comes in. So as I said, we have ten weeks to work with the student. And at the beginning of week four with the fragile states of health, where we start looking at exploring natural and human made crisis. From our global health perspective, we start the week start asking students, have you ever wondered why the information in Wikipedia is extensive for some topics and scars from others, whose voices are being represented in Wikipedia, that is the largest clopedia available throughout today, whose experiences are being documented. And from there, They are placed in groups and they are given the assignment print. Over the years, 100 distance learning have completed this assignment. We work in collaboration with the Wikimedia residence team at Edinburgh, so they receive training for those technical skills. And they as a group, have to decide they have to make a lot of decisions throughout this process. And they choose a stub, which is non just a blurb and a space, a blank space in Wikipedia for them to develop into their who article. And the assignment has since its beginning in 2019, when it was introducing the course, has always had a component to assess the student's contribution, but it has varied over the years. Currently, I This is some of the characteristics of how the assignment is completed at the moment. The groups are no more than six students. We, the tutors, develop the groups based on we take consideration of the time zones. We make sure that there's a mix of the programmes that they're representing so that there's a mix. They have six weeks to complete and is worth 20% of the course. The marking rubric is provided to the students from the beginning and they know that there are some marks that will come from the individual input, but there are also some marks that will come from the group work and the final article submitted. One of the strengths of these assignments is that students move from being consumers of information to becoming producers of public knowledge. It is an opportunity to use their voice, as I said before, to document a crisis and to publish this and make it a public facing article. We track their contributions to Wikimedia dashboards and editing history, which allows us to know what quantitatively what the input of a group has been. But we don't know how they collaborated as an academic experience. I just want to highlight that the Wikipedia editing assignment is also a really good way to encourage students to develop digital and critical literacy. Just an example. In terms of source credibility evaluation, we put a lot of emphasis on adding references and the value that Wikipedia has making sure that references are added or highlighting where reference should be added. Just for this one page on the Yemen migrant boat disaster, 104 references were added by our students. Another I Students learn how to critically apply information, how to structure a page. And this is just an example, how to add visual aim, how to add hyperlinks of technical, digital skills. And as they do often with Wikipedia pages, the pages still need refining after publishing as an assignment. But this is highlighted to the public. For instance, here it says that the article is written as a research paper or scientific journal that it should be rewritten in a more neutral Enclopedia and data also allows us to discuss in the course how we communicate global health issues to different audiences. So throughout the years and positive feedback questionnaires, end of the course questionnaires, also throughout the reflection pieces, that was the way we assessed peer assessment for during the years during the pandemic. We received mostly positive comments, especially in terms of that community that it was the way when asynchronous distance learning students managed to meet others, is the favourite assignments of their degree. Or learning the skills of editing a page. You can find more information about this because we presented in a previous conference and Iities available. But there's also recurring concerns which you often reach us through email or discussion posts where there are common to group work, uneven participation, limited viability of some individual contributions, some structural challenges such as collaborating with different time zones and levels of interest. So it's always posed the question to us. How do we assess the collaborative process, not only the final Wikipedia page for the mark. So responding to these student voices, we reintroduced the peer assessment because peer assessment was part of the assignment before the pandemic. But there was, it was just provide a mark to your peers. There was no standardised rubric. The communication wasn't that great and the Blackboard two wasn't visible to students at this because many didn't complete it or there was a lot of back and forth trying to complete. So we reintroduced peer assessment in a more, um, purposeful manner. We use Blackboard Web PA because it's linked to learn and we did a lot of communication, explaining the rationale to recognise individual effort, encourage sustained participation, and that we were responding to concerns. But most importantly was that we evaluated the reflections that we had received before and we identified 14 steps to complete the task where we thought students needed to be engaged and aware that the participation was extremely important for the group there. And here to the right, you can see the distribution of the peer assessments for this peers cohort. So at the bottom, you have the group, and on the left, you have the marks, which is up to 20 point. And you can see here that group E there was not much variation in the mark that they provided to each other, whereas compared to B, they were. There was no variation in terms of what the peers thought photos had contributed to these different steps. We also and Our main objective this year was to reintroduce it in a very standardised manner, and we started collecting some information about the peer assessment component and a post course course survey, which was in addition to the other post course survey satisfaction. And here we focus on the peer assessment. You can see the results. Even though we have a 28% participant, we can gather some interesting insight. And some patterns. And the responses suggest that peer assessment appears to influence individual behaviours more than the group dynamic, how much an individual is determined to contribute rather than accountability. And that web peer to do not pose major challenges to students, but accountability is obviously not automatically improved, not just knowing that you would be assigned by your peers, make sure that everybody contributed, and that collaboration remains challenging in the environment. So because there are some greater issues that students need to deal with with their life, but also sometimes that they are not keeping up with the work on the online inCNS people are not working at the same thing. So some considerations when looking at these numbers is that we had a limited number of responses. B that we cannot exclude, that the people who completed the assignment with more interest, they also completed the post assignment survey, and that obviously that's not our goal, but that assessment alone can also group work challenges, but that it can influence at least some of that behaviour. And we're starting to see that. We also had a bit of a qualitative response, some space to collect some qualitative responses. And what we see here is that they raised questions about waiting and communication of the assessment. They suggested that if more weight was given to, then we might have greater motivation to complete the collaborative assessment in a more meaningful way, and that there was still a need to communicate more clearly on how peer assessment can impact their final grade, and maybe that could impact their motivation. So this was completed at the end of this course, and now we have raised more questions for ourselves, but just to close that look, how can we and that we're working on this. How can we improve that aspect of contribution during the process. So some of the questions that have raised is how much PSS 20 final assignment might be increased or looking into the literature and how others have done it, for instance, completely affecting the scores proportionally. To what extent can we, as the teaching team, incorporate open ended questions for qualitative feedback and how do we mark that? And another important aspect that came up in one of the surveys is that if what we're trying to show students is how professional tasks in global health are really taken on different time zones, time to produce a product in very short time. So what does fair collaboration remote groupwork look like? Should that be included as a part of a discussion board and also examples. So just to conclude, student voice really helped us improve assessment design. So quantitative peer assessment hasly been implemented and students can influence the mark of their peers and because we use their voices to develop that rubric. But it definitely does not eliminate structural challenges of collaboration, and that's just the awareness and culture of collaboration and partnership we really need to keep working on. So thank you for your attention. Thank you very much, Evelyn.

Okay, I think we'll try to get started. We've got quite a packed schedule. So I think the way that the session is going to run is there's going to be 3 10 minute talks, and then we'll finish up with about a half hour's worth of questions. I've had a request from one of the presenting teams to have a little bit longer. We'll see how we get on, whether or not they need to be or they can be given that. I think we probably can give them maybe an extra minute or two given that we have got a half hour slotted for questions or roughly a half hour. Great. So over to Celeste who's going to be our first presenter. Thanks, Patrick. Good morning, everyone. Thanks very much for taking the time to come to this session. So I am presenting this morning on behalf of some colleagues as well. So Mary Brennan, unfortunately, wasn't able to join us today. And I also wanted to acknowledge another colleague who left the university. So Ian Glenn also contributed to this project. So I'm going to be talking about our curriculum development framework that I am am involved in developing. It's a QAA funded project. And so we really wanted to make the um the designing aspect of the curriculum much more visible. It's often a very kind of hidden aspect of our work. So the idea behind this project is to support people doing that and to make it much more visible. So we are, as part of this project, developing a framework for design of the curriculum, but also about evaluating the impact of that design process as well, which is quite a big ask. So we are doing it with a number of project partners. So there are five project partners listed on the screen there, and we managed to get an in person couple of days last October at the university. So that's some of us involved in the project in that image on the screen there. We came together at EFI and had a really productive couple of days. So that was really good. We've also worked with the SEEDA Curriculum Development Network. So they have been utilising their expertise and guiding us as we develop this framework. So this is the draft version of the framework. So it is a curriculum design and evaluation framework. It's got a couple of different components. There are six pillars to that framework with sets of interrelated questions, and those questions are really to design stakeholders through the process, the complex process of curriculum design, but also to engage in the evaluation of that process. So how impactful is that curriculum design process that has taken place. So this morning, I've just got a short period of time to talk about the framework and where we are with it. So I'm going to focus on the student voice pillar, given the theme of the conference today, and I'll hopefully get a little bit of time to very briefly touch on the collaborative working pillar as well. So as part of the project, each of the project partners are contributing a case study so that we have an opportunity to test the framework. And so the University of Edinburgh have decided to focus their case study on challenge courses. So there is a definition of a challenge course on the screen there and a link to further information if people are interested. So as part of the, um, the development of this case study, we have conducted an interview and a focus group to start to gather some data. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the preliminary findings of those those, that data that we've gathered. So, the good news for us is it was quite positive in that we had quite a lot of agreement around the pillars, around the draft framework that we were sharing as part of the discussions we had. So participants agreed that the pillars were appropriate. Discussion of the framework prompted a number of reflections about the design of a challenge course and also prompted further discussion about future design activities that they might want to undertake. It really focused on a discussion beyond the content of the curriculum and more around the design process. And it also encouraged discussions around things like strategic alignment and making connections and making things visible that were previously less visible. So that was reassuring. So that kind of visibility of the curriculum design process is something that we as part of the project were really interested in. And I wanted to share this quote from a participant who was involved in the focus groups, and just acknowledging the fact that this participant did recognise that they were already doing this curriculum design activity and that challenge courses did have kind of process and framework in place. But actually, the curriculum design framework that we were sharing prompted more, um, deeper reflection prompted the participant to delve deeper into that curriculum design process and recognise that there were further stages that they could go through. So that was really important for me as we were testing the framework. I said I will talk about the student voice pillar. So we've got a definition of that pillar on the screen there. So what we're trying to do with this pillar is actively centre diverse student experiences throughout that curriculum design process. And so we have a number of themed prompt questions to guide stakeholders through that process. You can see some of the themes on the screen there. I won't go into them in depth because I don't have a lot of time. One of the things that came true quite strongly was how difficult it is to surface student voice. So this was a real challenge when people were designing the challenge course. It was something they wanted to do. It was something they were actively trying to do, but they found it really difficult to do, and partly that was the interdisciplinary nature of the challenge courses. So the students are coming from across different parts of the university. So they weren't focused on a particular school. So it added to the complexity and the difficulties of surfacing student voice. And also, the fact that challenge courses are undergraduate first and second year courses also made it quite difficult to get the representative student voice as well. So those were challenges, but there were some positives that came through from the discussions that I had. So, you know, just acknowledging that there are ways to do that, the formal documentations, such as the course feedback allow some representation of student voice to come through. And there's other course activities as well that can provide valuable insights and feedback. So listening to student voice while teaching challenge courses was identified as something really important and something that can be quite tangible to get an understanding of the student perspective. So there's those informal moments before and after teaching sessions. There's also the formal paperwork, the evaluations that take place. But a really rich source of feedback was through the assessments that take place during courses and other course activities. So there was a little bit of discussion about the rich insights that can be gleaned from that process. So it's just listening to that and finding the time to engage with that and think about that whilst teaching and then thinking about how that could be implemented into future instances of that course. So quite a complex set of challenges there. And I just want to briefly touch on the fact that the collaboration with students is really important. So thinking about students as collaborators. So that pillar offers some really rich insights into student voice as well. So co presenting at conferences is one of the things that was discussed, and also building student agency into the curriculum design process. But that can be really difficult to do. Some people are there and want to do that. Others, it's not on the radar at all. So that's something that the curriculum design framework helped with with some of those prompt questions. So the framework has a lot of potential. I'll look through that because I'm running out of time, but that was quite reassuring for me. I just wanted to say post our curriculum development conference that's taking place in September, where we will launch the final version of the framework, and I've been involved in reviewing some of their proposals. It looks like a really interesting conference. So thank you for your time. If anybody is interested in following up with me, very happy to hear from you. Thank you. Right, as I said, in the beginning, we're doing kind of ten back to back talks before questions at the end. So if you've got great questions, make sure you take a note of them so you don't forget them in 20 minutes time. So our next presentation is a team effort, which I think includes students who are not present, but will be in videos. So who's starting first, over to Alison, Jobran, Elise, and Heather. Right. Do you guys I'll give you guys 12 minutes. Hello. Perfect. Thank you. Hello, everyone. How are you doing? This is going to be very speedy because there's basically six speakers that we're going to present today. But we're looking at how we engage the student voice in the School of Biological Sciences and just hope that this goes this way. So in the School of Biological Sciences, we really care deeply about the student voice in developing and refining our curricula. And four years ago, our curriculum went through a curriculum change, and a lot of the student voice was involved in that. And the students that you're going to see in the video in a few moments have been product of that curriculum change. And oddly, a record number of students took up educational projects this year where they were interested in recognising the value of researching science, education, and social science areas of interest. And so we had eight projects this year where students were researching a variety of issues that were affecting student life, and we're going to present four of them quickly today. And they were because we were supervising them and also because they were the ones that were interested in having their work presented, as well. So all the students who participated in the research projects had similar data collection methods, where they had surveys where they were able to survey a large sample of the student population through both qualitative and quantitative methods, and then subsequently followed up on those surveys with focus groups to get an in depth student voice from a smaller sample through qualitative research methods. So I'm going to introduce you to Mabel's project, who she had surveyed 276 students, and her project addressed the gap between students recognising the benefit of a reflective portfolio in the School of Biological Sciences against their engagement. Now, find the mouse. Wits back and like magic. My name is Mabel, and for my research project, I focus on engagement with the reflective portfolio within the School of Biological Sciences. The portfolio is a mandatory component of the first two pre honours years in biology. The first year teaches students about reflective practice and how to reflect, and this is broadened to context beyond academia during second year. In particular, students can utilise this tool for their employability, as it allows them to build a set of transferable skills by reflecting on their own experiences. Reflective learning, therefore is used to support students personal, professional, and academic development. While the portfolio has been designed to support student growth and the creation of transferable skills, these benefits can only be realised through sustained engagement. In practise, however, engagement is often low and the portfolio is seen as an additional task. My research then use a mixed methods approach to look into how are students engaging with the SBS reflective portfolio? What factors hinder or support their engagement, and how can engagement be better supported? Value emerged as having positive correlation with engagement, where students who were more engaged also found the portfolio to be more valuable. This was also true when speaking to students who said that they only wanted to engage where they found the portfolio to be a meaningful task. This extends into the idea of immediate and long term value, where students retrospectively recognised the portfolio's benefits, whereas earlier years students did not find the relevance of the tool so early on in their degree. While I found that engagement was largely requirement driven, particularly around portfolio deadlines or word counts, there's only increased surface level reflection as opposed to the critical thinking needed to truly support development. The portfolio is currently completed individually, so I explored the idea of collaborative reflection. Students had a positive view on this learning environment and believe that it could improve their engagement if group dynamics, including willingness to engage, could be properly managed. Through my research, I found that some of the barriers I identified could be overcome. Requirement driven engagement should be addressed using collaborative sessions where an informal deadline is created through a sense of mild peer pressure, prompting students to want to be ready to share or equally have a set time to fill in the portfolio if they haven't already been able to. Students emphasise the need for more personally relevant value. Having students who can talk about their past experiences with the portfolio as well as industry professionals who can attest to the importance of transferable skills within these portfolio sessions could increase students' understanding of the portfolio's value, and therefore may prompt them to engage more consistently. Thank you for listening to my pedagogical research project. Great. Thank you. So I'm going to introduce William Nicholson, who was co supervised by Alison and me, Jobran. He did a student survey. He was interested in the usage of usage knowledge, and concerns of students on generative AI. And so he surveyed one to four, mostly year one, but you can see he captured, which is 314 students, which comprises about 30% of all of our undergraduate students. So quite a big survey. But I'm going to let him talk about what he found. Hello. My name is Mabel, and for my research project, hello. My name is William Nicholson, and I completed my research project looking into the use of generative artificial intelligence in undergraduate biological sciences students. It is widely known that students are increasingly using generative AI to assist in their studies. The Higher Education Policy Institute found that 95% of students have used or are using AI to assist them in their higher education. However, currently, formal teaching is lagging behind. I researched the differences seen when providing students with formal teaching instead of just guiding students on when to not use GenAI, finding that students tend to take on interactive teaching much better than reading general pieces of guidance. This led me to developing the research question. What's an undergraduate students current understanding of using AI in an academic context, and how can the understanding of using these tools be improved? I used the mixed methods approach, consisting of surveys and interviews to research aspects of students use of AI. This allowed me to develop a proof of concept for an intervention designed to assist students with understanding when and how to use AI within their studies. From the results of my survey with 314 respondents, I theorised the cyclical conclusion when comparing four of the variables I investigated. The left graph theorises that students perceive AI to be more useful, they experience AI to be more useful, reducing their concerns, and therefore increasing their usage, leading to better perceptions of the usefulness of NI. The picture on the right shows the opposite to this. While many students are currently using GenAI in their studies, there are many who fear using these tools for many reasons, including their concerns with the environment. I also found that generally students felt that they lacked formal teaching from the university for how to use Gen AI, with less than 40% agreeing to this and 50% of students agreeing that it would be beneficial to receive more teaching from the university. I designed my intervention with aspects of scenario and game based learning with a preceding video explaining the university stance and how to use generative AI. Finally, it contains a short quiz where students are assessed whether they have taken on the content effectively. This proof of concept was created for me using Chat GPT, where I prompted it with my idea for this tool. The left panel has aspects of scenario based learning in a response answering box. The middle panel has game based learning aspects in a prompt appropriateness selection challenge, and the right panel contains a quiz, which assesses if students have taken on this content. As views received this very well with many saying interactive scenarios work a lot better for teaching than just reading. Currently available text heavy guidance is comprehensive, but it's hard to put into context. And mixture of both written guidance and interactive teaching would be effective for teaching students. One question which I was asked a lot was, what about students who don't want to use GenAI? This is reasonable, and if students don't want to use GenAI, then this type of teaching should not encourage them to use it. However, it is crucial for students to be able to recognise areas of research where GenAI has been used as an example. Thank you very much for listening to me speak today. So Jiatong did a very different project where she surveyed 371 students, and then she interviewed seven of them all over the curriculum of the undergrad. She was looking at students in part time jobs and especially how students can cope with part time jobs. She realised that completely contrary to what the UK amount of students working with during term time, which is 68%. She found out all undergrad student in biology, it's only 22%, and they have a median of 8 hours a week of work. Of those students, 86% work just because they need the money to survive, which I think is a very striking and important result. They have a stress level that is higher than students that do not work, but they have similar academic satisfaction. Now, they do have coping strategies because they realise that they have a reduced capacity to engage with study because they have less headspace and less energy. But the coping strategy that they are using are short term coping strategy, working with time management and task prioritisation and adjusting working pattern when they actually need the money. So what they would really like is more flexible session and more condensed timetables. Okay, so Louie's project was looking at the incidence of ADHD in our student population and also looking to see how those ADHD affected students received our reformed curriculum, which is highly interactive. And I'm just going to point to two big findings that she got. The first was that the incidence was exactly the sort of incidence that the NHS says in adults across the UK, roughly 4% diagnosed with ADHD. But she found that more than a quarter of our students considered themselves to have ADHD symptoms and to be suffering from the disadvantages without a diagnosis. And, of course, their needs are not being met at all. And the second big finding that she discovered was that in the ADHD students, we were particularly interested in our two stage exam, which is I'll tell you about during questions. And the ADHD students ADHD diagnosed students and the undiagnosed ADHD like students all did not find that to be a difficulty for them compared to many of the other components of their learning. And turn back on the mic. So what was good? It was really great to work with the students, and we found that we can say that co creation is a really great way to help us understand. Our curriculums help us understand how the students are experiencing those. And one of those reasons being that the student researchers are great for getting the authentic voice from the students. Students feel more comfortable talking to other students. And those students then get to leave a legacy on their course, and it's great for their CV for building their skills, and it is great experiential learning and development of the transferable skills. And one of the reasons being is that these students have to take ownership of this project. They have to a lot of the time design and come up with the research question. We guide them, but they all took ownership. And even though we had ideas for the project, they really took them and transformed them in a different way. And so in terms of some of the challenges that this can be a big steep learning curve for the students. They're not used to doing pedagogical research. And as a result, then sometimes we have to make sure that the students are aware of their own biases when they are designing their research project, analysing their data, and reporting that. That is something that is something that all researchers need to do, but particularly something that they have to encounter. And then that is it. Okay. I thought I'd just stand ominously off to the side to signify time was up, right? So then we've got the final ten minute presentation before we can hopefully have a nice conversation across all the presenters and yourself. So over to Omolabake. Did I get that right? Thanks. So Okay. Hi, everyone. Thank you for coming to our session. It's 10 minutes, and I've put on the timer for myself. So Lara can be here today because as a student, she's away on a field trip, but I'm delighted to talk about this, and I want to prepare you in advance, be ready to do some reading because I have a lot of quotes that I'm using so that you can get a feel of the student voice and staff voices too across in this presentation. And I'm going to talk about the challenge course understanding decolonization in a globalised world, which is the template that I used a little bit from my research to actually see how we can conceptualise embedding the student voice, not only in the delivery, but actually in the development of a course. I am not going to run through this, but you can see it's been two years in the making started from being the decolonization lead for the curriculum transformation programme, which had ended and how that went through in creating a community of practice. And I'm delighted that we have here some people from EUSA because I really did, you know, work with the students in terms of getting students to get involved. And they were, you know, compensated because that was a provision that was available within the CTP at the time. So I will use a lot of voices or quotes from the Teaching Matters blog that we did from February this year to March so that you can get a feel of what they say. And importantly, I'll have references that you could refer to if you want to read the blogs in full. I think this is just regular stuff. Maybe not. Because when you think of transdisciplinary approach, like Celeste said at the beginning, you know, when you look at interdisciplinary work, it's more difficult, but this was a requirement for the challenge course to have students from across different disciplines, which is why it was so important to recruit students themselves, to help to contact students, to actually contribute to the course development. So I want to go into the co-design. I did promise some people that they would be on camera today. This is actually a real group, and that's Lara actually on screen. This is one of the sessions. We had ten sessions over ten months in the community of practice. This is not all of us, but right here you see a physicist, you see doctors, you see Rea was a very able assistant for me during the project. And then you see students from medicine, from CSE, you see staff from across different schools all coming together. As a community of practice because the initial course outline, which I draw, I put it across to them, and we tested everything that ran through the ten weeks of delivery of this course that was delivered this year. And what were the core principles for co creation? I'm not going to read the slides, but I have highlighted the key elements of co creation, creating and facilitating that environment of belonging and inclusion and setting the tone that all voices mattered at the very beginning. That was so important, and it was really earthwarming to see students reflect on how important that was for their participation as members of the COP. And we did have a lot of interesting debate sometimes, but we were all committed that this would result in something beneficial for all students and the staff involved as well. I'll give you 30 seconds to read these quotes. This is what Lara said in terms of student voice. And you can read this blog. Well, I think I'm advertising the Teaching Matters blog now, oh well. You can read a full blog online, but this is what the student voice meant to Lara and other students that were involved. I think the key point I would like to raise regarding this particular code is how the student felt, in this case, that their voice was shaping the teaching. Because sometimes when we look at including the student's voice, it might seem like, oh, an additional task we want to do. And it's not just for Hame but for the student and being able to apply that in their teaching or in their learning, you know, elsewhere. Second, criticality. We disagreed, and then we agreed to disagree. And sometimes I think some of us were agreeing to disagree. But it really doesn't matter because at the end of the day, we all came to a place that we realised that for every single week, What we were going to present, what the course was going to reflect would display the different disciplines involved. And that's from Ra, who was one of the students. And another PhD student that was involved in the course design, you can see that the power dynamics was something that kept coming up, and these were PhD tutors already. And if they don't feel very comfortable about coming, I think there is a space for conversation to be heard. How do we facilitate that inclusive environment that makes students feel inclusive and really welcomed. Of course, the community of service. This is such a long code, but I love it. I love it because this is from a staff perspective, talking about what the community of practise meant to them, but also highlighten that time is of short shortage in the university. We hardly have time. I think we had the real luxury, you know, of having the COP because it was supported through the curriculum transformation. But this is not always the case. So in as much as we want to do this, can the university facilitate the space? Yes, the planning was I just had to put this in because I went to this you're also part of the planning, you know, I went to this exhibition at the university, and we used some of these for the presentation. So you see this particular image, is not so earth shattering, but I spoke to the subject of the colonisation. So it was transdisciplinary, experial, and importantly, we use the linked teaching approach, which was shared with the students, which had been written in a previous teaching matters blog post to connect the lectures to the workshops. So basically what this meant was that the lecture materials was what was used to facilitate workshop conversations so students could prepare. And this is what one of the staff was able to say about the linked teaching approach. So about co constructing because they already got the message from the lecture and now they're sharing. So the workshops were student led. And then these students had this to say about the tutorials, how important it was for them as students to be able to share their voice because they already had the knowledge and the equipment that they needed to prepare for the workshop. Experiential learning. Gosh, I need to go back to that because I promised Liam, who is in the room that I have a great photo of him. This was the presentation. This was the presentation. You can see I think this tutor is enjoying this thing a bit too much, but then the students as well, and it was on a difficult and challenging topic decolonization. But this is a testament to how students felt, and this was reflected in their reflective essays that they contributed later. So that's part of the experential learning. And in terms of interdisciplinarity, it was important for students to learn from across different disciplines. We had over 100 students on the course from 40 different programmes, and that was important for them to learn about the same topic using different disciplinary lenses. And this is another course on interdisciplinarity from a student who is also a member of EUSA or sabbatical officer who actually also audited the course because they could not take it for credit. And what underpinned all of this, and I promise this is one of the final two slides, is the concept of centrality. In the previous slide or one of the students talked about positionality. I think that was rare, talking about people having different positionalities, but we totally confronted what we were trying to do through the principle of centrality, which is about actively involving people, recognising their contribution and the challenges, and also recognising the importance of their contribution for overall learning. And I felt like this quote, also from this blog from SI, who was a PGT student, also one of the course developers, and based in EFI, international student as well, who had this to say about the inclusive approach. Okay. By my own timing, you see? So maybe the last 30 seconds to say then that I'll give you just 10 seconds maybe to read this. About the importance of actively involving students from the very beginning, recognising their contribution and using it not only at the point of collecting data, but at the very point of designing, because they decided what ways we should set, for example, the postal presentation that would be meaningful to students. So the references are there. Thank you very much.

please Thank you very much indeed, and thank you for coming to this session this afternoon. I'm Cathy Bovill, and I'm Head of Academic Development at the University of Edinburgh, and we have a range of colleagues with us. And what we'll do is each of us will introduce ourselves as we come to speak because we're going to share the presentation. Thank you. So we're going to talk about a co creation manifesto, co creation of learning and teaching manifesto. Very exciting. We want to give you a little bit of background where this came from. So, originally, we were all members of a student engagement strategy group that was part of the curriculum transformation programme. And obviously, the programme came to an end, but we kept meeting because we had a group that was focused on co creation. We were really fascinated by co creation. We were doing co creation, and we were interested in finding other people in the university who also were interested in doing co creation. And so we started to think about we explored literature, we thought about what co creation meant, and we wanted to think about how could we promote co creation and learning and teaching far more within the university? So if you go to lots of universities in the UK, people are talking about partnership and co creation, but often that co creation isn't necessarily taking place in the classroom. And we think that that's a bit of a superpower, to be honest. That's an area where students are already in that classroom learning, and it's changing the way that we teach in ways that enable students to be part of that process in meaningful ways. And so we started to kind of come up with, we're passionate about this. What does that mean? How do we translate that passion into trying to make sure other people understand and share that kind of realisation of what co creation can do? And we thought about creating a manifesto. So we wanted to provoke discussion. We wanted to co create the manifesto itself, which we did. We've had students and staff involved from this institution, and we've also tested these ideas and invited contributions from other institutions. And colleagues went to a raise presentation that's researching, advancing an inspiring student engagement conference that happens in the UK every year. Colleagues went along and presented the start of the manifesto and asked for feedback. We presented at last year's learning and teaching conference, looking for input from colleagues, staff and student colleagues. And we've done some dissemination through local teaching networks in some of the schools. And then we decided we wanted to have some sort of we're going to have to have some sort of web presence so that we can share the manifesto with people. We can gather examples of practise. And so we ran a student design competition in order to kind of create a logo and get some sort of feel visual identity for what we were doing. And you will notice along the bottom of the slides, what I believe technically in communication and marketing is called the skirt, which we're going to call the kilt because it's obviously tartan, but we are using the University tartan, and that was allowed. They said this is a university manifesto. And I'll show you more on the next slide, you know, a bit more of the logo, but we've gone with that theme of the tartan because it's about that interweaving of students, staff, and institutional perspectives and activities. So, you know, that's really the thinking behind why we went with the tartan. And we've already spoken about the manifesto with colleagues at senior levels within the institution, and there's quite a lot of excitement about how it could dovetail with elements of the learning and teaching strategy. So more about that coming. Thank you. So here's our nice logo and our lovely tartan. But we need to think, what do we mean by co creation when we're going to have a co creation manifesto. And we're using Tania Lubicz-Nawrocka's definition here, and I think Tanya might be in the room. I'm not saying. Oh, she's waving at the back. Great. Thank you for your definition. And this is about staff and students working together in ongoing reciprocal, creative, and mutually beneficial process to negotiate and share decision making. And we've bolded the negotiation shared decision making because I think they really, really distinguish co creation from things like active learning and other kind of related collaborative learning terms. Thanks, Callum. I am Celine from Edinburgh Medical School. So The benefit of co creation are very broad, wide ranging. I'm not going to go through all sorry. I'm not going to go through all of them. But basically, in brief co creation will simply improve the student learning experience and the teaching experience. So we've just put some example of benefit here. But co creation will lead to an improved engagement with an improved motivation, and that's going to lead to an improved performance. Sorry, I've got a cap in my throat, as you see here. Co creation will also lead to enhance belonging, enhance feeling of being valued, heard, seen, and we've heard a lot about today. What I found really interesting me personally is that co creation will lead to a shift from the grade to the focus on the grade to the actual learning process, which I think it's so key. And finally, engaging in co creation will simply bring different views, different perspective to the table and therefore be more inclusive and more culturally responsive. My name is Rea. I'm a PhD student in clinical psychology, and I have the honour to present your manifesto. You will see alignment with the learning and teaching strategy, as Cathy already said, and the Skills for Success framework. So learning and teaching should be with students, not done to students. Co creation can transform everyone, the students, the staff, and the institutions. Learning and teaching should be with students and not done to students, as I already said. Co creation, learning, teaching, and assessment is inherently inclusive, as we saw in our previous slide. Co creation is built on mutual respect, trust, and open minds. All staff have a responsibility to plan and enable co creation opportunities, and all students have a responsibility to bring their views and expertise to co creation activities. And institutions have a responsibility as well to enable and reward students and staff co creation. But how do you actually co create? You can offer choice between meaningful options in course content, learning activities, and assessment, nurture genuine engagement through dialogue, foster mutual respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. Seek agreement and develop understanding through respectful negotiation, promote student agency, and lastly, share power, ownership, and decision making. Hi, I'm Heather from the School of Biological Sciences. And when Cathy said we worked together because we were so passionate about it, that's so true, but also because they're such a nice group, such a lovely group. So we've been talking at the break about that it's good to have lots of ideas about this, but actually, in reality, how do you go about doing things like this? So these are just some examples. So if we start at the I don't know what colour that is. That sort of ready one. Co creation starter points. That's some really low hanging fruit, really simple things that you can do just to start that dialogue with your students. You can learn their names, treat them as individuals that you know, offer some sort of choice. Interactive teaching itself is now opening some kind of relationship or some dialogue leading to a relationship with your students. So that's a good starting point. And then if we move around the top anticlockwise, and co deciding course elements. So for this, we mean things like you could decide what the topic of the assessment is or what the weighting will be. And you may think that these are the sorts of things you can only do in small classes, but, of course, this is easily done just well, Celine does it using Wooclap in large classes, letting the students have those kind of decisions. And then moving around, codeing course elements. Such as the students are encouraging the students to suggest wordings for your assessment rubrics. We have one which is partially blank, and the students suggest which words should go in there after some training on what rubrics are for. And then co developing resources both within and outside the classroom so the students can actually choose their own learning, develop a resource, and learn as they develop that resource. And that also actually works really nicely with the co teaching over here on your bottom right because the students working in groups to do this are learning from each other. And choosing to some extent, what they learn. And then the sort of the big one, which is maybe the sort of least achievable if you're just starting out, would be to co design the courses, and we have examples of people having courses which have learning objectives, but no content, and the students can therefore decide the content. We have a padlet. If you've got your phone there and you want to tell us whether you've done some of these and whether you would like to try them, we'll give you um Yeah. Okay. Sure. Because I was just going to pass on anyway to Callum to finish off. Yeah. So I guess we're really keen to capture those examples because we know that a lot is going on, and I hope that that kind of wheel shows it doesn't just need to mean having a course with no content. It can be really simple things that you're probably already doing. If you're in this room, you probably are doing some of these things. But this part is really the call to action. What's the point of a manifesto if nobody's behind it? So what we'd like to encourage you to do is we've got a website here so you can access this afterwards, add in your examples, share it with a couple of colleagues, have a discussion. If you've got forums in your school, you've got other conferences, whatever it may be. Have a look through those examples. Are you doing something similar and then share it? Try and get one more person to do it, and that's how we'll spread this across. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you to all the presenters. It's incredible to see a manifesto. I love manifestos in general, and it gives a little bit of structure into our thinking instead of being a fuzzy cloudy thinking, it becomes something real, more tangible. So this is excellent to have in general. Callum, ready for the next one? Amy. Now? Yeah. There we go, Gran. Yeah, I'm going to give Callum just a quick breather before he moves on to his next overview. I'm Marianne Brown I'm Head of Academic Planning in Registry Services. I've been overseeing a lot of work that's been happening across the university looking at student voice and trying to understand what's happening at the moment. So we wanted to follow up on some of the comments Callum had made in his opening remarks today around some of the work that we've been trying to do and some of the initiatives we're trying to bring in to see where we can create a more unified approach to some of the student voice things that we're talking about today. So all of this is driven really from feedback from students, as you would hope. And NSS is just one indicator of that, as you know, and we get feedback in many different ways, and a lot of it's telling us the same things. And Callum talked about this earlier. We did see great improvements in student voice coming through last year's survey, and that was really positive to see. And I think conferences like this and discussions around student voice, they feel much more kind of pervasive through the university than they used to be. And I think that's really starting to reflect in students realising that we really do care about their voices. But despite that, we are still much lower than our peers in this area, and students aren't satisfied here with how their feedback is acted on and responded to in other areas. So there's still obviously a lot of work to do there. These are the specific questions coming through in NSS. I'm sure you're very familiar with them, and I don't want to kind of bang on about them. But what we see here is that it's really that challenge around how feedback has been acted on, and that's a real challenge for us, making sure that students understand what we're doing with the feedback that we give. Because as you can see, they're pretty happy with the opportunities that they have to provide that feedback. So it's making sure we're filling that full circle of engagement with the students there. And there was a great improvement in that last year. And just to recognise that it's often very much at that really local level, that dialogue and relationship that's been talked about a lot today. A couple of years ago, in order to understand where our challenges were with student voice, we undertook a baseline and exercise with schools just to understand what was happening. So this was looking across things like course evaluation, student staff liaison committees, town halls, other activities that colleagues were doing to engage with student feedback. Through that, we tried to understand who was responsible, what types of mechanisms were used, how effective people felt they were. And we spoke to all schools to understand the current state. What this really showed was probably no surprises here. Feedback was really consistent, probably the only thing that was consistent, but there's a real wide variation in how schools operate, but also within the schools as well. So there's a real kind of variation in what course evaluation might look like within a single school and certainly across all of the schools. There's also a variation in who's responsible for activities, who undertakes analysis of these activities, and who is kind of accountable for making sure that things happen in response to feedback as well. So overall, that kind of contributes to a lack of visibility within schools, and then also just across the university. So it's difficult to see what's coming out of feedback. So that's why we have to use these kind of sector surveys, institutional surveys to understand what's happening because actually, some of this really great feedback you're getting at a local level has not been surfaced. And therefore, we can't always see what the joints are across different schools, what common themes are coming up, and so on. The real lack of clarity, as I've mentioned before, around who's responsible for elements of student voice, and in particular, where there's actions that go beyond the school. So there's a lot of feedback that you'll get, particularly in things like SSLCs where it's actually nothing that the school can influence. And so what Callum will go on to talk about is how we're kind of trying to seek to address that by making sure that anything that's happening at the school level that you need to escalate up to the university, you have a mechanism to do so. And then finally, there's a gap in the kind of skills around this. So often people are doing an amazing job in student voice, but they're doing it on the side of their desk, and they might be doing it as part of a very busy other activities in their job. They might not have skills and data analysis, and they might not understand the best ways to feedback to students what's happening in response to feedback. And that's probably one of the biggest gaps that we've identified. Loads of people are trying really hard to feedback to students. Actually, it's not really getting to the students in a way that they are recognising, as we can see through those NSS scores. I'm going to hand over to Helm to talk about one of the components we're looking at to address some of this. Yeah, so this is we're picking up on some of that lack of clarity and lack of visibility. So through that baseline and one of the key things that came up is the SSLs students staff liaison committees are core pretty much everywhere. They look so different in different schools and even within schools. Some of them are literally an hour of reading out pre prepared comments. Some of them are really dynamic workshops where everybody is moving around and really trying to solve problems. The big issue is escalating those actions or problems upwards. So there's feedback that comes through those SSLCs that are you know, lecture recording is not great. Okay? Some of that can be done locally. You can enforce policy, but some of that actually needs to set higher up if it's a captioning issue or if it's an issue with technology. Your lecture can't really fix it. But also looking at things like, you know, we'd hear feedback of the slide the contrast on the slide wasn't great. Okay? The person teaching that can fix that in a minute, and it's fine. But there's so many things that need to go upwards. It might be cultural, it might be policy, it might be regulatory. You might have professional bodies to consider. There's so much going in, but it just stops at a certain point, whether that's a course, programme, school level. Often it doesn't get higher. And I think I mentioned this in my talk this morning. We had a have your say central mechanism, which was essentially a comment box. 80% of the comments in there were completely in the wrong place, and they had nobody it was clear to escalate it to to be dealt with. And a lot of that was because it was really local, but a lot of it was just because it was really confused and it was really hard to parse out. And that obviously will get back to students. I put something in, I never saw anything. I never heard back, and never got an acknowledgment, other than the automatic reply. So part of the solution to this that we're looking at is we've developed what we call the student feedback action log. So this is hosted in SharePoint, and it is I have to give credit to Cinzia in our team, who has developed this wonderfully automated system that notifies people when they've been assigned actions and allows thematic kind of categorization and due dates and all that kind of stuff. But the whole point of that is that all of the actions from SSLCs that make sense that need to be escalated upwards can go in, but also some of those actions that might feel really local. But actually, if we then put them in and we find out that ten schools have the same local issues, maybe there's a bigger issue. So this is starting to surface those things that don't rely on all of you in schools and in services to go, I wonder if that's a bigger thing. I'm going to email everybody and hope I get a reply and then set up a working group. This is starting to take some of that in a much more systematic way. And it It sort of stands to reason if students are raising it in an SSLC through their reps, through their feedback, fixing it will have an outsized impact on their experience because they care enough about it to mention it. And we're not kind of guessing based on our own experience. So here's just a little look at it. You can have a look at this online anytime. There are about 500 actions just from semester one and this year, and that's not even every school. So there's a huge overload of this stuff, and there's a lot of work in our team now to parse through this and find out what are the key things, what's driving positive and negative experiences, and then what do we do to fix it? So as I mentioned, there's automation is built in, which will tell whether it's students or staff who are assigned in action because it's really key for us that this is a partnership activity. So particularly student reps, but any student could be assigned in action if they're in the meeting. It's open staff pan students, so staff can use it to look year on year, see what's going on. But a big thing from my previous experience working with reps at USA is that reps come in with no knowledge, no context. They don't know what's happened. And this is a really useful tool of seeing what's happened? What was the solution? What was the progress? Don't waste my energy trying to do something that's been knocked back year after year for good reason, provided that's been given. And then we to focus our energy on something more useful. Everything needs to be assigned a theme. So again, we can start to pull out all those shared issues, and it keeps the focus on the things that marriage students, as I've said. And what we've also kind of supplemented this with is central action owners of those themes. So we've got 12 or 13, and there are people like Marianne, like Heads of Estates, people at quite senior level who've essentially signed up to be bothered by us on these themes and on these actions if they're not being addressed year on year. So there is now a clear escalation route to someone who does have the power to make a change. I think that's another really important feature of this. Now, these are just some of the things that have come through again just from this year. Joint honours perennial issue, we know, but now we have proof that it is a perennial issue, and we can really use that timetabling, lecture recordings, exam revision support. There's a lot of stuff about careers, language barriers. And what you'll notice is a lot of these are not in the gift of a school to fix. They are central issues that need to be dealt with by the university. And this is just another tool that both staff but also students can use to hold us accountable to make sure those actually happen, which is ultimately what we're here for. So let's next, just so everyone knows, I know some of you have used this updates to the process, bulk uploads, trying to reduce the friction there, doing more proactive work, bringing people together, reporting into the relevant groups and committees to make sure that informs future work. We know that might be slow at first, but trying to build that culture going forward. Bringing those people together, and, of course, working with EUSA, ensuring reps know that this exists and that they should be using it to hold us accountable, but also to inform what they are going to do in their year as a rep or beyond. So that's kind of where our focus is at at the moment. And very happy to take any questions later, or you can get in touch with us anytime. Thank you. Thank you. And Marianne, I owe you public apologies here because I was over relying on an older, I suppose, version of the programme and your name wasn't there. So I hope I'm not going to make another mistake here. Amy, is just you today. Just you. Okay. Okay. So this is thank you for your contribution, Amy. Better? Perfect. So yeah, thank you so much for inviting me along today. My name is Amy Monks. I am one of the development consultants at Sparqs. So I've got some information on the slide here about who Sparqs are. We love an acronym at Sparqs. The Sparqs acronym itself still tricks me now and then, and I've been involved with Sparqs a number of years. So it stands for Student Partnerships in Quality, Scotland. We're Scotland's national agency for student engagement and quality, and we work with students and staff across all and colleges and universities in Scotland to help embed student voice at the heart of decision making. So our vision is that students are partners in shaping their own learning of quality, making positive change to their own learner journeys as they experience them, plus those that follow them as well. And that is however and wherever they learn. So that could be your online students, it could be part time. You know, if you're at college, it might be apprenticicees, working all the way from sort of level two and three students up to PGR and PGT as well. Our work includes providing individualised support to different institutions, so each of the development consultants have a key contact at Sparqs. I am not the key contact for Edinburgh University. That is my colleague Chase, but I'm here today to share as he's on the other side of the globe celebrating a wedding this week. But what we do is offer support at that institutional level as well as the national level, training, guidance, creation of resources, networks for students and staff to get involved in not only to sort of learn from each other, but able to share and to develop what they are doing as well. Our main funding come from the Scottish Funding Council. And you'll see our website up there for any sort of further reference as well. So as I dive into the quickest student partnership presentation I think I've ever done, I want you to consider what does student partnership mean to you. We've all got our part to play, but what does it mean to you specifically in your role, in your school, as an employee, or as a student at the university? What does that mean to you? I've got to thank Emily McIntosh from this morning for introducing this resource that Sparqs have, and it is Scotland's Ambition for Student Partnership. As you can see here, it is a shared ambition for the sector that's being developed by the sector as well. So students and staff are involved in the development of this resource. The framework supports continuous enhancement and ensures that student voices are not only heard but also empowered to shape their learning journey. You can see up here, we've got eight features of student partnership, and they are all the kind of parts that make up. So when we're having conversations around what does student partnership actually mean? How do we get there? What does it involve? These were kind of the features that were built up to kind of explain that. And these are areas that we, the royal, we, you, me, can all support and enhance over, you know, the topic of student partnership. We've all got a part to play within our different roles, whether that's a teaching role, a support role, an external agency role, and using this tool to have conversations about partnership, how to involve, how to work with students, how to work collaboratively together, And, you know, every institution uses this in a different way. Every staff member might use this in a different way. Every student association might use this in a different way. But what it does is really helps shift the conversations and the culture and the goals of an institution in a positive way, to be able to talk about student partnership, to be able to carry on that genuine dialogue. I must ca, this is intentionally aspirational. We are not expecting everybody to be ticking all these boxes. There's no boxes to tick. This is aspirational for students, for staff, for institutions, for student associations, just to be open on that journey towards this partnership ambition. So please don't feel like somebody's going to check and make sure you've hit all these things every single week. Delving into this resource a little bit more. Each of the features have a sort of description to break down. What does that actually mean? So you can see the paragraph underneath genuine dialogue there. The QR code takes you to the main resource on the website, but this and all other spark resources are there as well. So, for example, for genuine dialogue, it means partnership creates opportunity for genuine dialogue and requires a relationship between the institution, the student association, and students, which values and equally values equally the contribution each brings. Each of the features also has indicators of practise. Again, this is not a checkbox exercise. This is just a little bit of guidance, a little bit of support to ask those questions to sort of see how we tease that out? How do we know we're doing these things? Is there any gaps? So one of the examples here is at all levels of the institution, spaces exist where students and staff can engage in exploring difficult challenges, participate in ongoing dialogue and progressive ideas. So what are those spaces like? Are the opportunities given to students to be involved in them? Another one is self evaluation and enhancement planning process, create opportunities and support for students to staff and staff to work together to reach a joint understanding of institutional strengths and weaknesses and develop action plans. So this all fits into the tertiary quality enhancement framework and the review process there as well. It fits in its map to the principles there. So this doesn't feel like it's another sort of piece of work. It complements it, and it's a tool to help you sort of achieve those parts of, you know, your quality assurance processes. What we want to say, as well is genuine dialogue is not just about having a student in the room. It's not just about having, you know, somebody with a bum on a seat. It's about how they're actually supported and trained and empowered to participate really effectively in those spaces as well. And that takes time. That is not going to be an overnight thing, but it all goes part and parcel and towards what genuine dialogue is. Next up, we've got diversity of student voices. So you'll see that explanation there, and I'm just going to highlight a couple of indicators of practise. So there's multiple opportunities for students to engage in the student partnership processes at a level that suits them. Students can choose to take part in engagement activities such as filling out a survey, contributing to a focus group, as well as taking on more substantial roles. That is all about opportunity. You might have students that never, ever want to be any more than just filling in a survey or ticking a box on an oily poll. That's okay. But what other opportunities are there for the people who are keen, who do want to be involved a little bit more? You'll know better than me how broad your demographic of students is. So what an excellent opportunity you've got there to do work around the diversity of student voices. So I could talk about this resource all day, but I think I've got 4 minutes left, so we're going to move on. So thinking about the soul work, I mentioned the principles of the data quality enhancement framework. It is still quite new. Everybody is still settling into that, but it has been designed to keep students at the heart. So one of the principles is student partnership engagement. This means that that principle is going to be something that underpins the work here at Edinburgh Uni as well as other institutions across Scotland. Not only will your work around this and having these conversations and talking about and hearing about all the things I've heard about the amazing work about Srin partnership here. It's going to go into your evidence base for your review. It's going to be in some of the work you do to draft your SEAPs your self evaluation action plans. It might go into conversations that you're having for your annual quality engagement visits with the Scottish Funding Council or QAA. So think about how you as an individual, as well as your department can support enhancements in student partnership. From now, you know, there's new opportunities I've heard about today, things that are up and coming. What part can you play in that? It's all steps towards enhancement and in a really positive direction. Again, there's loads of benefits to taking partners in partnership. Why enhancing that is really important. There used to be millions on here, but the texts are really, really, really tiny. So a couple that we're going to pick out is students that are experts in their own learning experience. This can really help drive enhancement and changes. So if there's opportunities for them to pass on their feedback, to be involved in discussions, to be in the development processes, for co design, for co creation, that can really, really help drive positive change. Staff, that building a more positive trust relationships with your students. If they can see that their feedback and, you know, their work and their involvement in different projects and their different initiatives is happening, and they can see that in real life, the impact that's having, that's creating a really, really strong sense of belonging and the strength of relationship there. And for the institution, you know, you're going to see improvements in that retention, satisfaction, your outcomes because you've got such a strong collaborative culture. So as we leave today or this section, at least, think about how can you enhance student partnership in your role? And I usually do this as a post exercise, so you can scribble it down if you want, take it away and think about it over the break. But really think about what can you do and how can you start having those conversations with your colleagues, with your students, with each other around that shameless plug for academic toolkit, a development toolkit that we have from Sparqs. It came out just in the last sort of six weeks, and it is there to help facilitate those conversation. There's multiple different ways that it can help. It's things like bite size, kind of formats, podcasts, summary papers. There's an acronym buster which goes down, which we all need to most things. But there is a toolkit there to help support and enable more of these conversations go forward. I will leave contact details on the screen for not only myself, but your key contact Chase, and we're happy to come back or discuss any of this. But thank you very much.

Ten minute short presentations from three wonderful speakers and then some time for discussion and questions. So my name is Hanna Chalmers. I co lead the Skills for Success Framework implementation at the University, but you're not here to listen to me. You're here to listen to Liam. Right. I think that's yeah, that's working fine. Thank very much. So yeah, my name is Liam Hill. I'm a teaching fellow in the School of Education and Sport here. But I'm going to talk to you about a much bigger project I've been involved in with colleagues from all over the UK, basically. It comes out of actually my colleague, Louise Taylor at Oxford Brooks, working with several of her social work students who are Muslim and kind of looking at some of the issues that they were facing in terms of inclusivity on their course initially. Um, and kind of building that into projects and things that we can do to make practices more inclusive around, particularly Ramadan for our Muslim students. So, as you're probably aware, if you work in higher education, Muslim students make up a substantial minority of our student body within the UK. Um, and I'm aware that this is kind of I'm going to be talking about Muslim students as if they're one homogeneous mass. Obviously, they're not. Every individual counts, and there's lots of different individual variation there. But we do know that there's an awarding gap when we look at Muslim students in the UK compared to the overall averages. And what we can do about that or what we think when we look at that is that there are clearly some barriers to sense of belonging and inclusion that arise when we talk to you. So this is not the work I was involved in, but this is some interviews with Muslim doctoral students from across the UK. And repeatedly in their statements, this is a really interesting paper, if you want to check it out. They kind of point to an idea that they can't be their full and authentic selves within higher education spaces or that they're having to make choices between maybe religious observance practices associated with their religion and kind of standard processes, procedures, the way the university year and assessments and things are structured in general in UK higher education institutions. Um, And, as I say, when Louise first started this project, a couple of years ago, she was working with some of her social work students, and they particularly pointed to issues around inclusivity around the time of Ramadan. So again, I'm sure many of you are familiar with Ramadan, but briefly, it's the month of the year in the Muslim calendar where Muslims will be fasting during daylight hours, so no food or no drink. More likely to require time out of their day to pray. And at the end of that month, as well, they're going to celebrate Eid, which is I often kind of equate it to kind of the impact or culturally of a Christmas Day or something like that. It's that big a celebration if you're Muslim. And again, talking with the students, what's likely to fluctuate over that period of time, um is so there's mixed evidence for the effect that the actual fasting has, but there's more consistent evidence for challenges to arise due to sleep disruption during the month of Ramadan, because students are getting up earlier or later or staying up later to eat. They also, as the month goes on, they'll have increased religious obligations to potentially be going to mosque during certain times at night. Um, and I think I'm in a space where kind of we're all for inclusive practices. But sometimes when I talk about this, I kind of need to kind of bring the carrot as well as the stick. But there's real kind of need here to think, as well about indirect discrimination and inequality legislation when we're thinking about how we structure our teaching and our learning opportunities for every group or every kind of, um, student that we're working with. So our project fundamentally revolves around two very large or reasonably large surveys that we did towards the beginning of last year. One is a staff survey, not going to talk much about that. The other is a student survey that we did immediately after that across a number of different higher education institutions. Most of them in the UK, some of them were international campuses of UK universities as well, which brought some interesting insights. And the surveys were both asking about individuals' awareness of Ramadan. Their feeling on the need for adjustments or changes to be made to teaching and learning practices during Ramadan and also their experiences of where maybe adjustments had been made and what their views were on kind of how effective they were. So kind of what was valued and maybe what was kind of a bit more performative. And that was certainly something that came out, as I say, at the beginning of this project when Louise was talking to some of her social work students. There were things they wanted that they didn't have, and there were things that they felt were a bit tokenistic that were being kind of signposted by the institution. This is just a slide kind of giving you some demographics for the student survey. Very briefly, we kind of had roughly three equally sized groups of Muslim students, students who were indicating they have no religion, and students of various other religious denominations. Key findings or key things to arise in the survey. So we asked, were you aware of when Ramadan was last taking place? And most did over close to 80%. Knew that Ramadan was happening during the year. This awareness was higher, unsurprisingly amongst Muslim students than non Muslim students. Interestingly, though, when we asked, did you think your non Muslim lecturers were aware that it was Ramadan, very few around 20% felt that all of the lectures were aware and maybe aware of the implications. So we started getting quotes out because we offered the opportunity for free text responses around this feeling of not being seen, not being heard, having to deal with any issues that might arise from that in their own ways without the support of the institution, which is obviously quite concerning. We then asked, do you think there's a need for change? And the largest response from our students was, yes, we think there's a need for change. Quickly followed, though, or closely followed by a large group who also had not really thought about it before within our sample. Very few felt that there shouldn't be any adjustments or recognition for change, so under 10%. And again, when we ask this, when we look at our Muslim students compared to the other two groups, they were much more likely to respond that they felt there was a need for change. And then we asked, were there any kind of aspects of their teaching that they recognised or had seen in the previous Ramadan being changed? Few did kind of overtly see this. So about one in five were saying, well, we saw either some change or a consistent change across all of our classes. And there was a real diversity in terms of some really inflexible sort of responses here where people were maybe wanting to change tutorial times and not being allowed to move between groups and others where the entire structure of, say, how tutorials were being delivered, introducing breaks around sunset so people could break fast. So there really was kind of a diversity if we don't do anything, and everyone just has to kind of follow and fall in line. Versus we can do a lot and we choose to make these changes to how we teach during Ramadan to be more inclusive. Some key findings to kind of how long have I got if I got to Okay, I've got 2 minutes. Okay, so I'll go through the next couple of slides and then wrap up. So in the non Muslim respondents to our survey, it was interesting that they noticed that inconsistency and that inflexibility. And they also commented favourably on some of the changes that they saw were being made for Muslim students. So this idea or this perception that actually being more inclusive and making these efforts was viewed favourably, not just by the Muslim students in our survey, Very small things were even appreciated by the Muslim students in our surveys. So simply acknowledging it, you know, starting a session by saying Ramadan Mubarak was kind of really helping build that sense of belonging amongst our students. And a sense of compassionate allyship was also pointed to. So some acts of solidarity where maybe perhaps food and drink was not being consumed by the lecturer or the teacher during that session. There was a bit of a mixture in views, and certainly it wasn't felt by Muslim students that that was necessary, but there was that kind of act of communicating awareness and respect, again, came through as really important. Um, off the back of this, you guys can go check this out, so I finish on time. But we came up with a full guide sort of based on we had a panel of Muslim students, educators, and religious leaders that fed into this, that's built off the back of the different surveys that we've done. Key takeaways, really, very simple things about just acknowledging Ramadan and celebrating it in our classes can make a big difference. And also avoiding assumptions when trying to foster inclusivity. So not saying like being performative and saying, I'm not going to eat in classes, actually ask what the students want, what will actually help them. Um, Could we go further? I'm not going to go into too much detail on this, but certainly in terms of University of Edinburgh guidelines and policies, maybe there's a few more things we could be doing. Ask me a question about that. I'll tell you more. And one very simple suggestion. So I was going to be presenting this with a colleague from University of Glasgow. So within her School of Psychology and Neoscience, for example, this Ramadan, there was just an email sent around at the beginning of Ramadan saying, Please, all staff, be aware that Ramadan is coming. Here's a list of prayer spaces, and, you know, Zayba commenting that it was nice to feel seen and it was nice to feel that I was included and recognised in the space. Okay? And a friendly reminder. That's when Ramadan is happening next. It'll be semester two next year. So you might want to think about that if you're organising your teaching and what you're going to do to accommodate that. Thank you for listening. Thank you very much. This is this point where I have to decide whether I start to waffle about too much or just to give our colleague a moment to find the next set of slides. So Jenna is up next. And again, I'm not going to overdo the introduction. I'll let you take the floor Try to be in this bit so the online can see. Oh, perfect. I can see myself. I don't really like that. Can I stand here so I don't see myself? Thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is Jenna Padgett, and I'm currently a fourth year undergraduate student here at the University of Edinburgh. About to go into my fifth integrated master's year. And I'm so delighted to be here today. So last summer, I had the fantastic opportunity to conduct a project all to do with how can we improve the sense of belonging among physics students from underrepresented groups? Because I myself, I am a physics student, if that wasn't clear. Um So I'll just begin with a little bit of background and context. So I am defining sense of belonging, just to do with basically a student's perceived support on campus and their experience of mattering or feeling accepted. An important contributor is the respect that they feel like they have from fellow students and also staff. And for the purposes of my project, I was defining underrepresented students as female students, students of colour, and students from low income backgrounds. And these students often report a lower sense of belonging compared to their overrepresented peers, and sense of belonging is really important. It has links with greater academic achievement, higher engagement, better mental health, and an increased likelihood of actually finishing their degree. And we must be doing more to help these underrepresented groups because they are still very underrepresented, despite the fact that female students in the UK make up around 57.5% of all undergraduates, they only make up around 22.2% of physics undergraduates. And of all physics undergraduates, only 1.7% of them are Black women. With regards to people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, they are twice as likely to drop out of their degree compared to their overrepresented peers. So what can we do about it? Last year I conducted a seven week project that had three main pillars of methodology. Firstly, I conducted an extensive literature review, looking at what are the barriers that these students face. What are some possible solutions to help remove or overcome these barriers, and if we implement these solutions, what would the positive benefits be for the wider physics community? And then I was lucky enough to also get to interview some experts either within EDI or physics education research, and they helped guide this literature review as well as contribute with their own findings. And then, lastly, I had interviews with current undergrads and recent graduates as the most important voice in this conversation is, of course, student voice. And I'm going to present my results today, and I will say that obviously this is through a physics lens, but a lot of the overall results could be universally applied. So barriers to developing the strong sense of belonging. I should also say that the barriers listed on the screen that I'm going to talk about are ranked from most impactful to least impactful, according to the interviews that I carried out with students. So at the top there, we have the belief that you must be a natural genius to succeed in university physics. There seems to be this idea that you have to have some innate talent that you're not born with that can't be taught in order to succeed at physics. And this negatively impacts underrepresented students a bit more because usually the characteristics that are associated with this natural genius are more associated with their overrepresented peers rather than within these underrepresented groups. And when I asked interviewees, well, what feeds into this mindset? What makes you think this way? I had a variety of answers. The idea that peers were picking up concepts faster than they were, Lecturers referring to certain concepts as easy, and just sat there going, I don't find this easy at all. And then also just the depiction of physicists, either through the media or throughout history. They're sat there going, that person doesn't look like me, and I don't think they're from the background that I'm from. Next, we've got the weed out culture that exists within higher education physics. Weed out courses are described as courses that are perceived to kind of filter out students. They typically have very high fail rates, and this fail rate usually arises because the content that is delivered through lectures, and then also the final exam, there seems to be a bit of disconnect and students feel like what they have learned throughout the year wasn't actually that applicable to the final exam. This negatively impacts sense of belonging because if you sat there thinking, I feel like the university doesn't even want me to be here and I feel like they want me to fail, then you're not exactly going to feel like you belong there very much. Next, we have the attitudes and behaviour of lecturers throughout their degree. I'm aware there probably will be a few lecturers in the audience, and I'd just like to make it clear that this is not a universal problem. And I don't think this applies to everybody. In fact, if you're here today, it most certainly does not apply to you. But there's this idea that if you feel like a lecturer doesn't really care or want you to succeed, then you're not going to have a high sense of belonging. Female students typically report lower levels of respect from their lecturers compared to their male peers, and students feel like if their questions aren't respected or heard by their lecturers, then that really negatively impacts their sense of belonging. Next, we've got stuff to do with microaggressions. Microaggressions are defined as subtle insults either consciously or unconsciously, directed towards underrepresented groups. This could include telling a student of colour that they speak English really well or male students assuming that female students will take over administrative or secretarial roles within group projects. And then just lastly, feelings of isolation. If you feel alone, you won't feel like you belong very much. When I asked interviewees, okay, in what world would you have absolutely no sense of belonging? The most common answer was, well, if I had no friends, if I didn't have that support network to help me get me through my degree. That's all a bit doom and gloom. So let's turn to some solutions. At the top there, we've got a greater emphasis on active learning. Active learning is defined as like small group discussions that often heavily rely on peer learning and problem solving. And peer learning is a really great tool. Not only is it beneficial to the student that's getting concepts or ideas explained, and they might be more willing to ask stupid questions to their peers rather than a lecture. But it also is really good for the student explaining it because truly you don't understand something until you can explain it yourself. Next, we've got establishing departmental action teams. These are externally facilitated groups comprising of faculty, staff, students, all with kind of EDI focus and goals in mind. The reason this is on there is because I'm totally aware that it's not a one size fits all, and different colleges and different departments and different schools will all have different problems and areas that need to be improved, and therefore, the solutions also must be targeted to that specific place. Building closer links between students and staff. There's a lot of studies to support that when students feel like the staffs are interested in their goals and want them to succeed, that improves their sense of belonging. So ensuring that lecture time is properly protected for lecturers through workload allocation models is really important to help building those connections. Hiring more diverse staff. Now, this is not simply a box ticking exercise. It's all about doing reevaluating what university departments find important when they're either hiring or promoting staff. I totally understand that bringing in grant money is important, and so is citations. I grew up in a physics academic household, so I knew that Google Scholar was updated on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays because that's what was talked about at the breakfast table. So I totally understand that that sort of thing is seen as really important within the field of academia, but you know what else is important? EDI work, outreach work, being able to act as a role model to the next generation are all really important, as well. And when we start to appreciate those things as they should be, then diverse staff more diverse staff will just come naturally. And then we've got a greater promotion of mentoring schemes for underrepresented students as well as internship opportunities, and making sure that these opportunities are not just based on past performance, but also on potential. And then just lastly, we've got the benefits of implementing these solutions. It helps us build a more collaborative research culture, because people thrive better also when in their inclusive environments. We've got generates diversity, generate sorry, diversity generates research questions that have not been asked before. And when you've got diversity of background, you've got diversity of thought, and this will ultimately mean that ideas are brought up that just haven't been before, produces overall stronger scientific outputs. Studies show that research groups that are more diverse publish more frequently and are cited more frequently. And then just lastly, some of these benefits, we just won't be aware of yet because we're not at a place where we're in an inclusive enough environment to know them all. And then what can universities do if anyone wants to take a picture of the slides? They are more than welcome. And I won't go through them all because it's mainly just a resume of things that I've been talking about. I'll just point out the top one to do with introducing more active learning opportunities, sometimes followed by like a social lunch. It's not just because students want free food. It's also because it's a fantastic way to transition course friends into actual friends that can then become part of their support network. And also, I'll just highlight listen to student voice is the most important voice in this conversation. And when students are telling you, these are the barriers I feel, and these are the solutions I think will be important, it's important that we don't only listen to these, but act on them as well. Then just lastly, what can we all do? Get involved as possible in EDI groups or departmental action teams, making sure your department is held to account on trying to meet their goals, setting goals is great, but you know what's even better, actually meeting them. Reaching out to younger you groups, trying to act as a role model. I know that when I was in my first couple of years of university, I really would have appreciated that. So I tried to do that as much as possible, and just talking about it, destigmatizing a lot of these things is really important. So that's me. I've included my email address at the bottom there and also a bit of shameless self promotion, also my LinkedIn. You got to do what you got to do. I am really passionate about the skills and I always have to talk more about it. If anyone was looking for new papers or just wants to chat about it, I'm always open. So thank you very much. I look forward to hearing your questions in a little bit. Thank you. I'm not going to get in your way. The lecturer in me is like, Oh, the tech. So yeah, thank you for that. It's lovely to hear these perspectives of different ways to think about student belonging and here student voice building up in this session. And now onto Neil for our third perspective. There we go. Yeah, all good. So good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for choosing to come along to these sessions. My name is Neil, and you can see my contact details there. And if anybody wants to talk about anything covered in here today whatsoever, it's a genuine invitation. I'd love to hear from you today, tomorrow, next year, or whatever. If you never want to speak to me ever again, that's also okay as well. So let's start off. I have to stand in here so we can so those online can see me. But I wanted to start off, Michael Fielding, who wrote quite a lot about Student voice Projects. He said, there are no spaces, physical or metaphorical, where staff and students meet one another as equals as genuine partners. Now, he wrote that back in 2004. Has much changed since then? Maybe in some of the classes that we might be involved with. Yeah. But universally, has it changed? I'd probably say not really. And that's even though the tradition as Taylor, outlines that the dominant understanding of student voice projects has been located within a democratic and a participatory framework. That's the narrative. Okay, with strong notions of empowerment, liberation, and collaboration. That's the narrative behind it. But as Fielding outlines, however committed that they may be, our student voice projects, they will not of themselves achieve their aspirations unless a series of conditions exist, okay, that are lined up with organisational structures and cultures to make desired intentions a living reality. So if we do not have the conditions to allow this notion of a democratic and participatory framework, then that won't be the outcome of student voice projects. Very straightforward in that sense, okay? So we must be aware that student voice does not stand as a neutral proposition, okay? Indeed, as I said, without democratic and participatory structures, student voice projects will not provide democratic and participatory outcomes, okay? And the lens that I'm looking through, of course, is that of social class. We might think about the class based inequalities that are baked into our structures, our cultures, our policy, our curriculum, and our pedagogy, not just in our own institution, but institutions across the country, high schools, primary schools. It's the same idea. So which students are readily able to participate and benefit from student voice projects? It's a wonderful thing to be part of, but which students are able to? And which students are invited to take part? Do we even notice? Is it the usual suspects that take part? Do all students know the rules of the game, and therefore, how and why it might be advantageous in some way to take part in this? And is the working class student voice heard in these particular spaces? We might be aware how students from dominant classes and cultures know the rules of the game and how to maximise their position in the field of higher education, how to succeed, and ultimately, how to progress their place in the social world. And indeed, taking part in extra and co curricular opportunities, like, for example, student voice, is an example of this very thing. And we're familiar with how the extra co curricular are often out of reach for working class students. So why is that? It might be due to other life commitments. Commuting in and out of Edinburgh might be due to part time work. It might be caring responsibilities is a few examples. But are our structures and practice really producing participatory outcomes for all students? We'll be aware of how working class students are not a product of the social world in which they now operate. As a result of this, they can experience really quite severe ontological fractures. These are immensely challenging. The very notion of who we are can be fractured. These are really serious things that our students go through. We must be aware of these things. And so taking part in the curriculum, you know, is incredibly difficult when you're made to feel that you don't belong. And this is an example of classes on campus. So we then have to ask ourselves, are organisational structures and cultures truly democratic? We might think then about our pedagogical practice and our curriculum design, and are they truly democratic? We've looked at some of the symptoms of the classism that our students might experience, having to work for their hours, not being able to stay locally, having to travel in and out other family and extended commitments. But if we look deeper at our curriculum, our pedagogy, and indeed our policy, we can find baked in inequities there as well. The hidden curriculum is a prime example. We think about how a particular way of being our class culture embedded And there's a particular way of being that's seen as a beacon of success of know how and excellence. That beacon is classed, okay? So we might think about the hidden curriculum as an example where we have this baked in inequality. And then the hidden curriculum, of course, would be the implicit ways of thinking about the world that are embedded in objects and practices and transmissions and social structures of formal education. We might think of the set of values and understandings that are embedded as such, ideas and perspectives. And so the hidden curriculum, which is facilitated by educators in all sectors, delivers social class oriented subtexts and meanings. A particular way of thinking about the world, of values of understandings of ideas and perspectives is legitimised. Okay? And other ways of thinking and knowing the world are delegitimized. And this is classed, okay? Pierre Bourdieu, the great sociologist, wrote that, where a particular way of being encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a fish in water. It does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world around about itself for granted. For working class students, they feel the weight of the water every minute of the day. They are now in a social world that they are not the product of, and invariably are not aware of the rules of the game, that secret that's passed on from generation to generation. So the hidden curriculum is a major contributor to this experience. So, as Michael Fielding said, do we really operate with organisational structures and cultures that generate truly democratic and participatory outcomes? If we don't, student voice projects aren't going to deliver truly democratic and participatory outcomes. So where do we go from here? Well, there's a slight turn that we have to make here just to be aware of what this actually has a wider connotation for. And this is Miranda Fricker's notion of epistemic injustice. In epistemic injustice, she outlines as the harm or discrimination a person experiences as a knower, okay? So how a person might be unfairly discriminated against in their capacity as a knower, based on prejudices that are based around their social class, their ethnicity, their race, gender, for example. Byskov writes very nicely to clarify some of this by saying that this form of injustice can structurally affect what is included in a collective pool of knowledge. It leads to an underrepresentation of the experiences of marginalised individuals and groups and in turn affecting their ability to make sense of their experiences. So we might think of the Student Voice Project, and it gathers a pool of knowledge and understanding and feeds it into what we do. But if that pool of knowledge is not universally democratic and draws on working class student experience, then we have the problem of epistemic injustice. We could look through the same lens with regards to gender, and we could look with regards to race as well. My lens is just looking at the moment on social class. We all must be very aware of epistemic injustice. This is really, really serious. And indeed the resultant absence of the working class student voice in the pool of knowledge that outlines and guides what we do and how we do it. Thank you. For the great educator Paulo Freire, he says that Education is both an expression and an instrument of society in a radical transformation of the education system, has to come about a radical transformation of society. So in the absence of that, what might we want to do in the meantime compassionately and lovingly to make things better. We need a clarity of perception, which is no free gift. And this clarity of perception allows us to acquire a critical notion of reality, what our students are really experiencing. And that means we need to name the world, okay? We have to name the world. If we don't name the problem, how do we generate proper solutions, okay? So we name the problem, that we have classism, okay? And student voice does not stand as a neutral position. And we question whether our structures and practice are really producing these participatory outcomes that we want. We ask if our pedagogical practice, our curriculum design, and content is truly democratic, or does it assume one class way of being that is legitimised over others, and that we reject the notion of epistemic injustice and reject this lack of clarity that it doesn't give. If we do all of that, then we might be able to start down the road where working class students can become part of this collective pool of knowledge that student voice projects are about. And maybe it's a simple question. Maybe I wasted 10 minutes of your time, and I should have just said what Michael Fullan said in 1991. What would happen if we treated the student as someone whose opinion mattered, although I might slightly edit it. What would happen if we treated every student as someone whose opinion mattered? A radical thought perhaps. Thank you.

Thank you, everyone. Welcome to this afternoon session. My name is doctor Jackie Dohaney. I use she her pronouns. I work in the Academic Development team in Academic Quality and Standards. I'm almost going to get it right. So we're going to hear from three lovely groups of people today. I'm going to hand over to our first presenters. So Dan and Deirdre, please take it away. Hi there. So I'm Deirdre, and together with Dan, we are going to talk a little bit about a challenge course that we ran for the first time this year called Living in the Anthropocene. And today, we're really going to talk about kind of the ethos and structure of the course, as well as some reflections on that, under the themes of student voice and hopeful action as well. So as I mentioned, this was a challenge course that was across CSE. It was all about the climate and nature crises. So in the anthropocene, which is basically this era that we're in now of human influence on the environment. And it was total across CSE. There were seven schools involved in the development and the teaching of it, which meant that we got a bit of the student experience of working with an interdisciplinary team and learning from each other, which was really nice as well. It was open to all undergrads, and the assessment was based on a reflective blog, which we'll come back to and a group project as well, which I'll speak a little bit more at the end. The image, sorry, Dan, can you go back 1 second? Just to plug the blog that will be coming out soon from Dan on some of the development of this course was done through the medium of Lego and serious play, so keep an eye out for that blog. Thank you. So in terms of the foundations of the course and the kind of core skills we built it around, there are these five broad themes. So reflection and collaboration, which Dan will talk a little bit more about through reflective blogs that we had the students doing throughout the semester and collaborative projects and tutorials and workshops. We looked at data analysis, mostly focusing on data literacy and critical thinking there. We used guesstimation as a tool for learning and teaching there, which proved really effective as well. In terms of the design thinking, we got the students to be kind of involved in the whole process of design and give them oversight over their projects, and we got them to think about how to pose problems as well as solve them. In terms of taking action, this was primarily through the project output, which again, I'll talk about in a few minutes. But it was about allowing students to choose topics that matter to them, and they worked in these interdisciplinary teams to kind of learn from each other as well and use those different perspectives. And I'll hand over to Dan to kind of link how some of these themes map to those skills for success that we have in the university as well. So brilliant. Thanks, Deidre. And I popped on those little icons for the skills for success, thinking that Lorna might be in here, but we did use them and they did inform what we were doing. So what we want to do today is focus in a little bit on what we were trying to do in the course and give you a flavour of some of the things that we did with the students and then some of the things that the students did and their reflections on the experience. I think the things that we wanted to really draw out were how we sought to embed co creation and really making space for the students in the course, how we wanted to draw in their expertise, their passion, their curiosity, and elevate that, whether that was building their confidence or providing fora in which they could then share their ideas, their perspectives, their ways of making a positive difference in the context of the Anthrop scene. I was one way in which we were talking about student voice or thinking about student voice in this course. I think another one was thinking more individually about students and embedding reflective practise as a means to give space to the students to identify their individual voice, to think about their values in relation to climate and nature crises, things that were important to them, and by providing that space within the course for reflective practise, by building that in repetitively, and that's one of the things that the students came back with is like you keep on making us do this. Why? It's like we're trying to build habits. So this is purposeful, it's intentional. I guess that was a really important part of what we were trying to do. And the final thing we want to draw out is kind of making space for hopeful action. So a lot of the research around working with students around climate and nature crisis is a sense of overwhelm eco emotions, climate grief, anxiety, and so on. And what we wanted to do was embrace those feelings, recognise that they're important, feed them with facts, ways of thinking critically, and empowering the students then to do things with those emotions, getting them to think about how the future is not certain, it's not determined. Other futures are possible and they have a part to play. And so I think we were trying to build up that kind of hopefulness in the students. But how then did we do this? Well, one of the ways in which we did this was through group work, and this is a slightly complicated mirror board for the group practical. So the students were interdisciplinary groups of five, and they were working together to design a creative output proposing some kind of intervention in response to climate and nature crisis. But we didn't just say, create some kind of intervention. We embedded in scaffolding group work and skills in working in groups, as well as design thinking all the way through the course. And so each of those arches is a weekly activity, and within the weekly activity, there are other kind of activities going on. I think the importance of the arches is about launching something, getting the students to do something, but then also making time for landing it. And that's one thing that maybe I've not always done, that you kind of run out of time when the students are doing activities to really kind of articulate the significance and the importance of that activity. So a few quick kind of flashes of the ways that we make space for the student voice in the course. Lecture is probably not the easiest place to kind of introduce the students' voices and perspectives. But we start this course with a series of images that are used to tell stories about the anthropocene. So it was seven images, seven stories about the anthropocene. And then after that lecture, we set up a mirror board and asked the students to submit their own images and their own stories of the anthropocene. And so the start of the next lecture was a recap around this idea of the anthropocene, but using the kinds of images that were meaningful to the students and the perspectives that they were bringing. So I guess it was that invitation that to kind of bring in your own perspective, what's important to you into the class, and that's at the ethos for the course. Another thing that we did was we wanted students to work in groups, and rather than reading a list of instructions of what good group work looks like, we asked them to create their own group charter. We'd sent them off on a scavenger hunt around this campus where group work had gone well for some groups and not so well for others. We also gave them some resources. One was an anti feminist sorry, a feminist and anti colonial research group on plastic pollution and how they have protocols for organising their work. So we've given them resources and asked them to come up with their own group work charter. So how were they going to work together? And all of this group work activity was leading towards working together to decide on a creative output that would propose some kind of intervention in response to the anthropacy. We gave them some instructions on a series of creative outputs, but we didn't limit to these as outputs, and some went on to do different things. But we wanted to give them the space to choose their own medium for communicating what was important to them. We also wanted them to think about design thinking and document their design process. So it wasn't that they were just coming up with an idea and proposing it. This needed to be researched. It needed to be backed up with evidence, data literacy. And so one of the things that we built through all of those arches was an iteration through this double diamond of design thinking, which is, I guess, an approach that the British Design Council has proposed. And so all of those arches basically gave the students an experience in that. And then we asked them to do it independently on their own project and document that process of how they use this double diamond. And this is the kinds of things that they produced at the end of the course. Sorry. I'll just leap back in to zoom in on one of these. So yeah, as you can see, they created a huge variety, right from the global, like putting solar panels on remote volcanic islands to the local. This Echoscot one was about more efficient recycling on campus. So we had a huge variety of projects, but one that we just thought we'd zoom in on to give you an illustration of how it worked was a zen that one group produced. And when we spoke to them at this exhibition, they basically said they were quite a group of students, but fast fashion was something that they talked a lot about amongst their peers. And so they decided that that was what they wanted to focus on. So they made this beautiful zen looking at what was the problem, what were the statistics behind it, and then some proposals for how they might change it both locally and globally. And this was the design document that accompanied that, and it allowed the students then to really evidence and justify some of the data that they used to do that. So why they chose the topic, why their approach was appropriate for the topic that they chose, and it was a really nice way of looking at that. In terms of, then, some of the course reflections, we had because of those blogs, we've lots of chances to look at what the students thought of different aspects of the course. Two recurring themes, which I'm just going to put up briefly here was the interdisciplinary of it. So they worked with really diverse teams, and a couple of the students pulled up on, for example, in tutorials. We would propose a scenario, and they had to work together to think of a solution to this. And they really enjoyed working with both the technical and the social sides of things, and they learned a lot from that. And the other thing that came up quite a lot was this idea of the creative output and being able to kind of take agency in what they were producing. So that was their reflections, and I'll just leave it to Dan to put up These are some of our reflections. We've been getting waved out for time up, so I'm going to leave these kind of here just for a second or so. I think one of the things was the repetition and scaffolding of activities to build student confidence. So it wasn't just about providing fora for students to have a voice, but actually, how do we support students, whether that's in reflective practise, whether it's in group work to articulate that voice, come together and find out ways of working. And I guess the other thing was about kind of investing that sense of hope in a course like this. So if we're dealing with heavy issues, really kind of troubling futures, how do we engender that sense of hope in ways that acknowledge the feelings that we have and then channel them to kind of more productive ends where other worlds are possible? And I think what's really lovely is that came through in the kinds of projects that the students produced. Thank you so much. Cheers. All right. We're going to hear from our next set of presenters. So it's a lovely team of folks talking about teacher education. Duncan, ML, Laura, Alan, Jenny, Suzanne, and Lorna. Hopefully I said that right. Who would like to speak first? ML. Okay. Okay. Give it to you. There we go. Duncan. Thank you. Yes. All good. Hi, everyone. My name is Duncan McBride. I'm a lecturer in Teacher Education at Moray House School of Education and Sport. I'm joined today by my colleague and or on the course, Dr ML White, Senior Lecturer in Teacher Education also at Moray House, and we're very fortunate to welcome our students along to speak in dialogue with us today. We've got Alan, we've got Lorna, Laura, and Jenny. And they'll brief introduction, but they'll say a little bit more about their roles and contexts as we get into the discussion. We're here to talk about our course, becoming a teacher educator. It's a course that has a unique design intended to support teachers to develop as teacher educators, so situated leaders of professional learning, recognising that increasingly in education, professional learning is moving into practise context. And so we had to think differently about our role. You'll see that our students come to us with a huge range of experience, knowledge, and expertise in their field. And so that forced us as teacher educators within higher education spaces to think a little bit differently about how we value and privilege that expertise. And so we're going to just talk through a couple of elements of becoming a teacher educator and how that course is designed differently, and we're going to hear about the student experience of those aspects. Starting with self study, and Emle, I think you're just going to say a brief word on self study. Does it work now? Oh, yes. It definitely works now. Okay, so before the party begins, well, before our party begins, note reference to the keynote earlier, a few words about self study. In this course, the assessment was a portfolio submission, and that portfolio focused on the self as learner. So thinking about who am I as a professional, as an educator, as a learner. And that's particularly important. So it's a chance to self study gives us a chance to reflect on the process of learning. It gives us a chance to think about teacher identity. And I'm not exploring the many variations of teaching because we all teach in different contexts, but also what it means to support others in their learning and develop that community of practise and consider our work through a critical lens. Self study asks a develop decidedly simple question, which is, what are the assumptions I'm making about my own practise? And how does this impact on what I take seriously about learning? I could keep talking about this, but I won't. I want to say, though, just really briefly, because it's important that we all speak in this, that what you're about to hear and the reflections from this work, and we were all engaged in self study, they're not polished conclusions. Each of us pursued something differently and asked different questions. So what follows are honest accounts and reflections of what happened and how we paid attention to our own learning. Alan, to you. So, my name is Alan Forster. I am a primary school teacher. I qualified in 2014. But for the last five years, I've worked sort of centrally within the local authority to do raising attainment. Logistics I'll go around a lot of different primary schools. Thank you. And so the reason why I started this course. Hello. Yeah. The reason I signed up to this course was to sort of learn more about the theory behind learning and sort of creating professional learning. So for the opportunity in this course to be a learner again in many different ways was quite eye opening. So for my task, I learned Olympic weightlifting. So I did a lot of running, and I wanted to try and do some strength training rather than just kind of, um do some basic training. I thought Olympic weightlifting would be good to do. So I definitely put myself in the deep end there. But sort of the biggest learning for me was in terms of when I went to the class, I was feeling really scared for someone that's never done weightlifting or anything like that. And my biggest thing was that when I arrived there, it was a safe space and that I was able to be vulnerable and I was able to sort of jump feel safe and sort of learn something brand new from scratch. And that's the kind of thing that I've learned is that I need to sort of create those environments going forward. I did I do it on a daily basis for children, but never thought about it for adults. And when I'm creating professional development, sort of thinking that, yeah, as an adult, you can be scared to sort of learn new things. That was my main thing, learning. Thank you. Hi, I'm Lorna Henderson. I've been teaching for quite a long time, secondary trained, was head of languages, deputy head for a few years, and now I've started a new role in a learning community in Edinburgh where I work in primary and secondary. And my role mainly is to support teachers in their professional development. So it involves a lot of coaching, a lot of observation, a lot of trying to create relationships quite quickly, which has been brilliant. And I started this course roughly about the same time as I started the job. And I decided I was going to go and learn watercolour painting because I am not remotely artistic, I don't think. I've never done anything like that before. And I thought, I will go and buy a book and I will buy some paints, and I will have a nice safe space at my kitchen table, and I will learn how to copy paintings. And very swiftly realised I actually needed sort of that kind of community of learning. So I joined a class, which was a big leap. I never thought I'd be standing here with anything that I created in front of a lecture theatre in a university. But here we are. And it was definitely a real position of vulnerability, this course, in particular, for me, and I found the format of the course and the learning that took place on it. I think I said this in the assessment forum. I said that it was actually almost quite therapeutic in many ways because the level of voice that we had on the course and the amount of exploration that we were able to do as learners and educators really kind of disrupted my identity of myself as a learner and an educator. And going to these watercolour classes meant I had to sort of sit with uncertainty and imperfection quite a lot. And that was quite challenging and had to with the portfolio, I couldn't just gloss over my mistake and forget about it. I had to kind of interrogate the mistakes that I was making or interrogate the learning process. So that in itself was really interesting. And it really gave me an understanding, I think, of learning as being very nonlinear and quite transformative rather than transmissive about not just acquiring knowledge for an end goal, but really helping to sort of surface assumptions and encourage me to critically examine them. So what you can see there is that was I hated this class, by the way. We went in and we had to do we had white cherry blossom on a white background, and I thought, why? And then they said, and you're only going to get black ink to do it. So what you can see is a black ink drawing, and then water is used to draw the colours out of the ink. And this is just an example of the kind of process that I went through because I found that kind of repeating the techniques and using that sort of structure actually helped me create, and then I was able to draw parallels to professional inquiry and all those kind of things. So that's just a me snapshot of what we created. Thank you. I think we're running low on time, but one of the other themes that we explore in the course is using complexity thinking and complexity perspectives on knowledge to frame learning a little differently. As a result of that, we have different perceptions and interpretations across our students about what learning theories they felt were the best fit for them, and we're going to hear a little bit about that now. My name is Laura. I've been teaching for 20 years, and I'm currently doing a DHT role at the moment. At the beginning of this course, I really genuinely thought, know, I've got lots of experience. I'm an adult. I'll be able to pick up a new learning skill. No problem at all. I'll just set my mind to it and everything will be great. But actually, it's far more complex and messy than we would be set the scene for. So when I was reading about complexity theory and the importance of the ecological lens as suggested by Kei Cars and Jeff, this really resonated with me in my own professional learning experience, and I've just got two or three little takeaways I wanted to share with you. One of them was that the initial conditions are so important as learners, we're not all starting from the same starting point as we think we are. Our personal and our local boundaries can have an impact on our learning being transformative. For example, our context, the setting, our relationships, where we work, all have huge impact. Our learning should be a long term focus. Quite often, we're focused on ticking a box or going to something that gives a certificate. But actually, learning is longer term. And the final one for me was that learning should increase and build capacity. It's extremely important that our learning should bring transformative results and benefits for not just ourselves, but also our learners as well. Well, thank you. I'm going to keep it really short because I'm I'm last and I've about 30 seconds, I thought I've gone over. I'm Jenny, and in my role, I am a teacher educator for early years educator, so a little bit different from my colleagues. I'm going to skip all of that, and I'm just going to say that my study really forced me to learn from the inside out to break down those assumptions that I had about myself and those that I also teach or support in early learning. It disrupted my practise and enabled me to improve as a teacher educator and really have an impact looking forward, and I'm really looking forward to taking the learning I've had to make that impact. Thank you, everyone. We do also have something on assessment that we can maybe get into in the Q& A because it has a specific setup in this course, also, but thank you for your attention. Thank you, team, and apologies for having to cut you off there, but we'll keep a schedule, and I'm sure there's lots of questions that people have in the audience for you at the end. Our final presenters, our final group are talking about art in context, and it's Alice, Adam, and Jude. This mic is really good, so I'm going to recommend you guys use that one. Thank you. Those are two really amazing sessions to follow on. Our session is essentially the culmination of many conversations that we've had over the last two years and specifically to prepare for this very short presentation. So we're going to read quite a bit because we've got so much to go through, and hopefully we can answer or unpack some things in the questions afterwards. So What we realise is that the student voice on art and context too is really embedded in the course, in the theory that we teach, and in the learning and teaching methods that we use. So really briefly, Art in Context two is in the second year of the BA Fine Art, which we're kind of newly rolling out. It follows on from Art in Context one in the first year and it precedes Art in Context three in the third year, and it sits alongside art in Practise two in the second year. But they really sit side by side. We also wanted to say that this course was written by the late Rebecca Collins, and this is the third time in September, this is the third time that we're going to be teaching it. So the overarching aims of the course are for students to gain confidence in voicing their own critical perspectives as they progress on the BA and importantly, to situate their practise within wider collective principles of equity and freedom in the city and essentially become active citizens in the professional fields that they will enter into. So we're going to focus on Semester two, which is bookended by two workshops in which the teaching models and ethics of care, citizenship and community that offers students a safe space in which the voice is heard, in which it is supported, and importantly, where it's socialised. Learning is embodied and creative. So we use fine art methodologies in our teaching for students to create or construct and sometimes literally construct a critical response. Learning is further supported on this course in this semester, too, by a summative assignment called group proposal in which students are invited to present a video presentation for a site in the city of Edinburgh, which they respond to as artists, and we hope to share a little bit of one of our students' submissions in this presentation. So our first workshop, researching the city scaffolds learning, and then the second workshop invites students to collectively reflect on learning and expand critical and creative thinking. Great. Thank you, Alice. So the first workshop researching the City invited students to work in small groups in response to artists and projects selected because of their distinctive approaches to the urban environment. We were interested in artists who had developed their own language for working with the city through things like participation, intervention, mapping, research, or exploring relationships with publics and places. Informed by Saski Assassin's question, does the city have a speech? Students considered, if the city communicates, how do artists listen, interpret, and respond? As Alice outlined, this workshop was connected to the larger group proposal, which tries to really ask students to engage within the complexity of a city. The second workshop, art world, shifted focus to the structures of the art world itself. Students were asked to imagine what kind of art world they wanted to participate in, asking things like, what would the White Cube institution look like if it genuinely reflected the ambitions, needs, and intersectional identities of you and your peers. Using the familiar form of the White cube as a starting point, students created physical structures that reimagined institutions, including mobile galleries and alternative spaces. Making these ideas physical helped bridge theoretical discussion and creative thinking. So a challenge that we've encountered is finding a balance between providing enough structure to support this kind of level of investigation, while also leaving enough openness for students to surprise and challenge our perceived role as experts or authorities of knowledge. Instead, we aim to position ourselves as kind of confident listeners. Present to support students in articulating what matters to them, what's at stake, and why. We've also found that space really matters. So workshops need environments where students can move, gather, make, and exchange ideas rather than simply reproduce the hierarchies of a more traditional classroom setting. It feels kind of funny to say that in here. So these workshops have shown that the student voice does not emerge automatically from openness. It requires carefully designed conditions, and our role becomes less about delivering answers and more about curating spaces, materials, conversations, and provocations. So now we'd like to share a sort of excerpt from a student's work, which platforms a sort of liveliness and one example of a range of student responses. Have you heard. Completed nearly 200 years ago, the old college quadrangle was seen by many as the symbolic heart of Edinburgh University, a tourist hotspot, a postcard favourite, and the epicentre of the institution's elite academic cultivation. Interestingly, this space rarely feels like a hub of student activity, a place for collaboration, synergy, and community. Instead, it's quiet, passive and tight. This is something we wish to agitate and investigate. In this presentation, we will share with you our project proposal titled Have you heard, exploring the conditions of the chosen site, the normative behaviour of society within it, and a clandestine approach to disrupt this institutionally enforced passivity with an intervention we describe as a gossip network. Stood within its core, it is clear that this is not a site for idling. The few benches available are occupied quietly, most choosing to move through the space with an untold etiquette. The space seems to suffer from a kind of unwritten rule of passivity, a sense that it belongs to the university administration. So that's just a taste of one of the submissions. We've got an art in context two. So I'll round this off to say a core idea within the social justice informed theoretical framework of art and Context two is the centering of knowledge and experience which might be marginalised by heteropatriarchal colonial structures. And by distilling the little we say, we rarely say this much, as a teaching team in the workshops to very carefully refined prompts, we convert ourselves to facilitators rather than didactic presenters. And in doing so, we invite the student to voice their own lived experience, perspective, and thoughts. And this activates a key theme across those progressive theories that structure the course, namely a more expansive approach to whose knowledge is valid in formal institutional settings, including academia. In the workshops, especially, we seek to gently nudge the more conventional models of top down learning by reentering the student as a source of knowledge, not just a passive recipient, of course, content, We emphasise live chatty group work, student exchange, and collaborative problem solving, imagining and ideation within the workshops to strengthen a model of student voice which collectivises speech and listening. We try to encourage the student to feel not only responsible for amplifying what comes out of their own mouth, but through structuring the sessions around peer to peer exchange, locate them within a network of reciprocal care, close listening and encouragement and support between students. Within the workshops we've discussed, active listening skills are interlinked with confident articulation, student voice is socialised rather than individuald. The approach is informed directly by the decolonial, queer, and feminist theories at the heart of the course curriculum, and our collective professional experiences of working at high levels within organisational contexts, spanning the continuum of political activism and artistic organising. A once centering assertive voicing and generous listening, equip students to become active citizens in their communities, capable of articulating and realising possibilities for resistance, action, and intervention. Student voice for us as an opportunity to enact social responsibility, generosity, and leadership as an act of service. Thank you so much to the third group.

Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for coming to this session. We're going to have 3 10 minute talks, followed by discussion in the second half hour of the talk. So please do hold on to your question. Welcome also to the audience at home. And I won't eat into your time anymore. So the first talk will be Jenny, Jenny, and Adrian. Thank you. So, hi, everyone. My name is Jenny Greene. I am a Student Advisor in the School of Chemistry. This is my colleague Adrian Penny, who is also a Student Advisor and Jenny Gracie, who is our Widening Participation and Outreach manager. Yeah, thank you for being here today. We're going to talk to you today about our feedback or perhaps I should say, our engagement model, which has evolved specifically from our work with widening participation students. We're currently in the second iteration of this cycle, so we've just finished the second feedback lunch. And we feel that this is a cycle that could be replicated across student groups and across schools. But I think it's really important to just speak shortly about the background, how we got here, and why I feel that the style of this engagement is particularly applicable for our widening participation students. So we started off with the simple intention of wanting to understand what it's like to be a widening participation student in our school and how we can improve that experience. In the School of Chemistry, I think it's fair to say that we've got a sense of pride in our community in chemistry, and I really wanted to understand whether that's something that all experience all students can experience, particularly those from non traditional university backgrounds. We really want to know, does everyone feel comfortable here? Does everyone feel that they can belong? How do we ensure that all students, regardless of their background, experience our school as a place where they can thrive? I think it's also interesting to note that just last week, the Royal Society of Chemistry published a report called Beyond Access, how socioeconomic background shapes the chemistry pipeline, and they call for a change in the environment in higher education as well as its accessibility. In my personal experience as a student advisor, I do hear students from working class backgrounds, from state educated backgrounds telling me fairly negative stories about their experiences here. And often those are experiences which wouldn't be experienced from people from more traditional more traditional university backgrounds. Some of the themes that come up are particularly feeling different, feeling alone in their experience here, or having it hard to have their voice heard. And as hopefully you'll hear from Adrian and Jenny, we've tried to address some of those challenges in the very way that we are engaging with our widening participation students. Um, and by keeping students involved in every step of the process, we really aim to give our students agency and hopefully in doing so, to reaffirm that they have their place in our community. So yeah, Adrian and Jenny are now going to talk about the practicalities of how we approach this. Thank you very much, Jenny. So the way we decided to find more about what our WP cohort in School of Chemistry wanted out of their experience in school and how we could support them was we first asked ourselves, what do we want to find out from them? What do we want to learn, and then what can we action as well. So some of the key areas that we decided to focus on included a sense of belonging, opportunities, both social, academic within the school and facilitated by the school, as well as support both pastoral and academic support in the school and how we could support that for the students. We decided to go with a focus group format to facilitate discussions and really explore and expand on those themes, and we were open to being challenged by the students about whether those were the themes we wanted to expand on or not. And we thought that group discussion was the first and best way to achieve that to begin with. We also thought that there were a number of benefits to running a focus group One of them was allowing students to hear from each other and meet each other, students from underrepresented backgrounds and feel validated by each other's shared experiences in some instances. We also thought it was a great way for students to build on what each other was discussing and really nurture that discussion with members of staff. We also thought that it was a great way for us to give the students reassurance in real time about the topics that they wanted to discuss and really encourage them to expand on things if they felt that that was important to them, which is not always possible when they're doing something online or not having someone there to encourage them. And finally, we did an online version of the focus group which allowed us to transcribe and really record accurately what students were sharing with us. In terms of when we're creating the focus group, we made sure to make them as accessible and create as much safety for the students to share their feedback as possible. In terms of accessibility, some of the things we did was advertised via email to all WP students. And when we were recruiting, as well as in the focus group, really stress there was no pressure to share information, but they could share as much or as little as they want from their experience. We also made sure to stress who the information that they were sharing was going to be shared on with and just specify, you know, it was only going to share within student support team or WP manager within the school to make sure that they knew that it was just going to be acted on by a specific group of people. And we also highlighted that they had the ability to retract anything that they would like. And we were very transparent about this throughout the process to reassure them. And Finally, we also made sure that we were doing a focus group online, as I mentioned earlier, to allow flexibility for other commitments that WP students, we know, maybe have outside university with part time jobs, caring responsibilities, amongst other personal circumstances. And finally, we will make sure to recognise their time with voucher reward vouchers for them for participating and recognising that participation and time they were giving us. In terms of creating safety, we make sure that in that initial stage of the focus group, not to have school staff present, but rather collaborate with the central learning participation team. So we work with doctor Neil Spears from that team because he brings expertise from having this conversation with students to help them feel that ease in that initial information gathering stage, and just having an impartial member of staff that can help have those conversations to begin with. I We also make sure to get students permission to say, if we're going to share goals with them, to make sure that they were sharing with us to share those goals to say what they were telling us, make sure that we were stressing that they had the ability to retract that information if they would like to, but also stressing that was going to be sharing in a very limited way within our team to help act on that. So I'm going to share with my colleague Jenny to share about the feedback lunch that we went on to do. I think being the third speaker, there's less to say, so let's just leave it shorter. So each of us then went and reviewed the recording of the focus group independently and sort of gathered our understanding of the conversations, and we were really pleased to see that those fitted into the three themes that we're interested in hearing about. And that then led on to the next step, which was the feedback lunch. So all WPs in chemistry were invited, along with a personalised invite that went out to the students that had already contributed into the focus groups. The idea of them was that students could hear our insights, and obviously we kept student comments synymous, but it was also so that we could get more contributions from a wider range of students and start to get those actionable outcomes. Feel that this step really builds trust between staff and students. It holds us certainly accountable. It's not just as gathering information. It's then actually acting on it, and it begins to close that feedback loop. So the lunches themselves were held in a familiar setting. So in our chemistry teaching spaces, a couple of us were present there to help facilitate the discussion, and we allowed lots of time for questions or comments as we talked through the different themes. So, along with the students, we then begin to formulate potential actions. And not only did we come up with ideas to tackle the issues that were raised, but we also prioritised them and weighted them so that then we had some sort of system to take forward for us actually actioning them. Of the two cycles that we've done, we had five students join for the feedback lunches, which might sound quite small, but we are quite a small school in chemistry. But it was actually a really nice manageable number for people feeling comfortable and not feeling like it's too big a group to share their opinions in. And it was also a mix of students that had taken part in the initial feedback group and students that were completely new to the cycle as well. And, of course, there was a free lunch to thank them for their time and contributions. So the beauty of the model is that we can also share the outcomes of the previous cycle and really hear from students firsthand how have they landed and how have they impacted their time as students in the school. So this demonstrates the value that we place on student voice, and that their feedback does lead to these tangible improvements to the experience, and then officially closes that feedback loop. So thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of both the focus group and the feedback lunge, we saw a really nice distribution of student representation, both in year groups. So we had representation from first year to fifth year, as well as our three degree streams, which was what we were hoping for and thankfully came together. We really feel that was because of the inclusive and transparent language that Adrian described as that students felt comfortable coming along, and it was their input we were looking for. So because it was across your group, but also brought together students from different year groups, and really that community continued to build. So we would hear conversations of older students sharing their experience about labs and things like that, which is always what we're looking for. So one weakness that we might want to work on is how best to communicate these actions more frequently rather than just as an annual activity so that our students, not just our WP cohort, but everyone can hear how their input leads to change, and I'll pass over. So there is a wide range of implementation, I suppose, and a lot of those were very school specific, but I just want to take a wee moment to tell you about what I think of the most important, most exciting thing that we were able to do. After the first iteration of this, we were pulling together the feedback just by luck at the same time as the Community Champion funding call. And by getting that funding, we were then able to recruit to WP specific community champions from our student cohort. Those community champions had a remit for organising events aimed at widening participation students, acting on the feedback that we received, but also acting from their own personal experiences of being students in the university. Um, this was an opportunity for us to maintain student involvement in the whole cycle, to increase agency, and also to acknowledge the labour that goes into the community building events by remerating our students. And I realise that there's a bit of an elephant in the room there in terms of funding and perhaps something that we can discuss in the Q&A section as well. So our community champions organised two events in semester one this academic year. The feedback from it was really positive from all the students that went along, and actually, it was brought up at our SSLC for first years as a highlight of the year. I think it's really important to say that the community champions were able to create these particularly accessible and welcoming environments by virtue that they were students. It's something that we couldn't have done as staff within our team. Unfortunately, Josh and Fatima aren't here today because they're doing much more exciting things with their summer. But just in the spirit of being student led, I wanted to finish with some of their words to hear their experience of their role this year. So Fatima told us that the impact of the study and exam advice event was evident in the way that first year students stayed behind after the session to speak with panel members, to exchange contact details, and seek ongoing support, demonstrating that the environment encouraged that meaningful connection. Josh told us that speaking with students during the events highlighted how creating welcoming, low pressure spaces can meaningfully improve students' sense of belonging within the school. The role also improved excuse me. He said the role also pushed me to develop confidence in taking the initiative, working collaboratively with staff and other students and reflecting on how small design choices can influence and feel who feels included. While I enjoyed planning the events, I particularly valued being able to take part in them and experience firsthand the sense of community that we had created. Thanks, Josh, and Fatima. Okay. And then the second speakers are Elena and Peiyu Okay. Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Joy and I'm a PhD student from Moray House. Today, I'm really excited that I have this opportunity to share with you about the project I've been working on with Elena, the Learning Technology Support Officer from School of Engineering, and the project is called Feedback Improvement Toolkit or FIT. And so the background of this that we receive some concern of, like, the quality of feedback students experience, not very they're not very happy with the feedback that they get for their coursework. So through this project, we explore three questions. The first one is what makes feedback effective? And the second one is what staff members need to navigate, what challenges they are facing in providing the feedback. And the last one is how can we engage students and empower students to engage with the feedback they receive? And before I explain everything, I want to start with a simple activity. So now, if you could please pick a number 1-10 just in your mind. And a good number will get a score. So are you committed? Okay, ready? Okay. I'll reveal. So only even number will get a score. So what just happened there is that half of you probably think, Yay, I got a score. And the other half was like, how was I supposed to know that? And then that confusion is very similar to what student experience from receiving feedback comments for their coursework. The criteria is often not visible to them or is not explained or discussed. So how our approach to understand the situation here is part of this is that we talk to the students, and we also talk to the staff. We did a focus group. We invited students from School of Engineering. There were eight students participating in the discussion, and we simply asked them what makes feedback helpful for you? What makes it unhelpful, and why? And this is what they told us. We have exact same feedback comments, but I get higher marks and the other person gets 5% lower. And then what show up here is that maybe there's a logic behind it, but it's not explained. And the second one is that I'm not sure how can I improve if they see a generic comments like, I see the attempt here, but the logic is not clear. So through our conversation, it points to four things that they want to see more. They want to see the changes in the feedback they receive. The first one is clear expectations, what they are expected to do, what a good work is supposed to look like. And the second one is they want to see a link between the marks and the criteria, what they are being marked on. And the third one is to elaborate if there is a mistake made in their assessment, why is it wrong, and then the last one, how to improve on it in the future. And, sorry. And as we had a conversation, they were really excited about it. So I was previously an engineering student. So I kind of feel I can connect to them and then they share what they feel that is a good example of feedback. And surprisingly, is actually what we have been working on from what we see in the university guidance and also from the college level guidance. The three components, the explanation. The first one, recognition points out what has been done well, like, very well presented, explanation of what has been done wrong, what's a mistake. And the last one is how to make it actionable in the future. But yeah, as I said, personally, I feel that as we see, it's very different from the written comments we see usually in the essays assessment. For academics, it actually depends on the professional knowledge, and then there's domain specific needs that they need to put onto it and in order to provide good feedback. And the challenge for staff when we talk to them is that to maintain that consistency and details at scale is actually very difficult. Sometimes they have really large cohort, but with limited marketing capacity. And even with enough markers, sometimes there is no training available to train the markers to make sure that they are on the same page. And another aspect is that, for example, in design projects, there's discipline specific needs like if you are designing a chemical plant, you need to meet certain criteria and standards But what is difficult to assess is the logical reasoning behind it, the communication between you and your teammates and also the presentation skills, the way you write and report. And that's the hard part, like, how do you assess those skills? So I think it would be nice to use the iceberg analogy to illustrate the problem here. Most of us would see the marks and written comments as the process of feedback. But actually, there's a whole system behind it to support the end result we see. And here's what our project fit come in. So through the conversation with both sides, we come up with this like a loop feedback loop. It's informed by the university guidance, and also part of action feedback protocol is incorporated in it, and the five steps is set expectations. What is a good work look like with examples and share expectations. To discuss with the students. And the third one is mark student work, how to make sure that everyone is on the same page, and then they apply the same criteria. And we are really grateful that through this project, we have involved geoscience and bioengineering, and then they provided their examples for us to include it into this toolkit, including assessments like field work, that it's all written notes. It's very different essay based assessment, and also we have other lab reports, design project from School of Engineering. And the fourth one is where the AFP comes in. We recommend to use the three structural feedback structure to provide effective feedback to students. And the last one is, like, we want to see more like how to engage students to act on feedback with activities like peer reviews and also from bioengineering, we have a reflective portfolio, and that has been done for many years, and we really learned a lot from that. So the project is actually to encourage not to impose this model on everyone, is to encourage discussion around why feedback is given, when it's given what is communicated and how it's delivered, and what students do with it. So my final page of my presentation is starting from my personal experience. I think, for example, back in school, if you ask a math genius, how did you solve that equation? And a lot of time they would just say, I just know it. I don't know how to explain it. And I feel that for people with engineering and science mind, that's a struggle to explain the logic behind it because it's become, like, natural for them. And then this model is actually a hint or a tool to help them reflect on different ways that they can communicate better and make the feedback process more transparent. And in the future, we hope to see to talk to more students. And also, my call for action is if you're already involved in any type of assessment, can you use these five steps to reflect on the process and then see if that can bring any change for students' learning and development. Thank you. Thank you, Joy and Elena. Next, it will be Elizabeth. Thank you. Do you want to use this one? Yeah. Sometimes  Can folks hear me? Yes. Sounds okay.  Okay. Down and up. Sure. Okay. Okay. We'll live with this is this We'll live with this. Okay. Hi, everyone. Thank you for being here. My name is Elizabeth Pankratz. I'm here presenting on behalf of my team whose faces you see above me. We are a team of four lectures in psychology, where we're focused on teaching statistics to undergrad and MSC levels. But in this talk, I'm focusing on undergrads and in particular, giving a bit of a practice report of what's been keeping us busy for the last year, namely designing systems of alternative assessment to hopefully ease some of the anxiety that our students feel about statistics. So here's a bit of background on our context. I won't go into the details of this, but essentially, what I want to show is that undergrads in psychology are required to take five full semesters of stats training, two full years at pre honours, and then a final semester in honours to bring them up to the standard of statistical skills that the British Psychological Society requires so the degree is accredited. Um As you can imagine, people who choose to study psychology are interested in the human mind and brain and less in doing five semesters of math. And so we get feedback that the courses are intimidating and daunting and overwhelming, and I can absolutely see where they're coming from. And so what I'm hoping to share with you today is how we've been working on redesigning, not just the curriculum, also the assessment structure to hopefully make the courses a little bit less intimidating and overwhelming down the road. So there are two sort of main things I want to share with you today. The first is our best attempts at gathering student input on the redesign. Because, I mean, the stats is a big and daunting, imposing part of their degree. So we wanted to hear their thoughts, what would help them in the redesign, and then how the input that we got shaped the decisions that we made about the assessment structure. So, first up, we tried two different ways to ask students what they wanted from the redesign. We sent out sort of a proposal, a little summary of the changes that we had planned, and then invited folks to an in person drop in discussion session, less structured than a focus group, but sort of a face to face opportunity to chat. But then for the people who maybe face to face isn't so much their thing, we also sent out an anonymous online forum and ask for their input. So of the approximately 500 students that we served this year and asked for input from, the drop in group elicited feedback from two, the anonymous online form got us feedback from four. We're hoping they're an additional four. I'm assuming they are. So that means we've got a grand total of six opinions from students and absolute mystery what the others think. Like, I know they have opinions. And but we don't know what they are. And so we also don't want to assume that what we've heard from these six people will generalise across all of them because, I mean, obvious reasons, sampling bias, and so on. And so the best way that we were thinking to try to fill in these gaps of what will help students is turn to what other students, not ours, but students and other practitioners have said in literature around the scholarship of teaching and learning. And so we used some references there to make some reasonable guesses and help inform our decisions. And so I just wanted to take a second to flag a few of the key references that are behind the philosophy of our redesign, where essentially the idea is that in traditional grading, we end up punishing students for making mistakes in the sense that as soon as you try something, maybe you get it wrong, suddenly you've lost a mark. And it doesn't give you the freedom to mess around and play with things. And, like, real learning is messy and hands on, and our current grading system punishes that. And so these are three really good references that go into depth on that idea and give some alternatives, ways to make grading assessment more compassionate, authentic, and equitable. So these are the books that underlie sort of the philosophy of our redesign. And I wanted to show them all to you. And so Together with ideas from literature and the student voices that we got, here are the two sort of main changes to our assessment structure that I want to highlight. The first one is in how students will evidence their learning. Up till now, there have been three components to the course. We've had weekly quizzes. We've had a collaborative group report that they do sort of three quarters of the way through the year. And then there's a final exam that's in person closed book. What we're switching to, it's a real paradigm shift. We're adopting a framework that's called skills based assessment, where the idea, essentially, thank you, is that the course will come with a set of skills. That we want students to achieve throughout the course. So for the intro stats course, it might be like, I can visualise a continuous numeric variable, or I can do a T test. And the idea is these skills are shown to students. They can make any number of attempts that they want to evidence those skills, to show that they've got them. If they try once and don't get it, then that's fine, and they just try again later until they do get it. And once they've achieved the skill, they can never unachieve it. So their trajectory, their repertoire of skills can only grow. And it might grow linearly, like in this plot over time, but it can also and more likely to kind of wobble around because this system is more flexible in dealing with, you know, students with different time commitments, time management decisions, and so on. And everybody can come to the same point and acquire the same skills. It's just we're not imposing on them the timeline in which they should do it. So we pitched this idea to the students, and the feedback was pretty uniformly positive. The students in the discussion section liked that it reflects the way that stats is practical and hands on and, like, you've got to do it to really acquire the skills. One of the online respondents said that it offers better insight into the ability of people who are remarkably capable in real world uses of stats but struggle with the high pressure assessment scenarios that we've been putting them in. And then there's a bunch of literature emerging in the last several years about how skills based assessment and other related cousins are more motivational. So instead of punishing students for making mistakes, this gives them room to mess around and room to make mistakes, recover from it, and continue to achieve something. There's also some really nice work showing that skills based assessment can eliminate gender gaps in test anxiety. And because of its flexibility, it can accommodate all kinds of different learning trajectories, which I think, especially for, um, sort of this formal stats kind of thing for students who are not, you know, a priori really wanting to do this. Um, I think this kind of accommodating different learning trajectories is a really powerful feature of the system. Okay, so that's how students will evidence their learning. And then the second question is about what course outcomes students can receive. Up until now, it's been sort of your classic weighted average of percentages from the different course components. And what we're switching to at least at pre honours, is just pass fail, where the idea is now to pass the course, students have to evidence 75% of the skills in the coursework. So in this sort of repeated attempts are possible throughout the year, and then again in a final exam. Now, I wish we didn't have to have a final exam, but it's the current go to for AI safeguarding stuff. And so we're stuck with it for now. That's, you know, a battle to fight in the future. But for now, this is what things are looking like. And views on pass fail among the students were a bit more polarised. We had students saying they liked it, but, you know, other people might only work hard if they have a chance to get a good mark at the end. So recognising that grades are a really powerful extrinsic motivator for people's behaviour, it'll push them to do stuff that they wouldn't do otherwise. Um, the first piece of feedback here from the online form says that pass fail is seemingly the best change because it'll reduce the stress that people are feeling in stats. And the final commenter from somebody, I guess, in their third or fourth year, they think, thank you, that the exam being changed or the whole course being changed to pass fail feels unfair when previous years were held to such a high standard. And, I mean, So there's a sense in here that it feels easier and more doable, but also, I would dispute that it's held to a higher standard because achieving 75% of course skills is arguably harder than the standard that we have now for students to pass. So I don't think we're lowering the standard at all. And I'll just summarise this quote. This is a great paper about the merits of pass fail grading. Essentially, it can be more equitable. It can reduce competition because we're not ranking students with respect to one another anymore. It can help students collaborate and foster intrinsic motivation if people discover they actually do want to go above and beyond. We're not forcing them to anymore. So to wrap up, you'll notice I've been showing a lot of ideas and not any data, and that's because the redesign course launches in September. So to find out if it's worked, we're going to ask the students and hopefully get more than six students telling us now what they think. So I'm all ears. I've been gathering ideas all day for ways to reach out to people to hopefully get some more input. This past year, we've been gathering data for the before condition, and next year, after the redesign, we'll be gathering data for the after condition, so stay tuned. Maybe a year from now we'll be back with some results. So thank you. That's it for me. Thanks on behalf of my team, and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Hi, everyone. Thanks ever so much for coming to this session. We've got half an hour for two presentations. And in this session, what we're going to do is actually take each presentation for 10 minutes and then have 5 minutes questions, and then we'll go to the second presentation. So just so that you know the format that we're going to go through. And I'm actually going to let the team introduce themselves and their topic. So absolutely straight over to you. Hello, everyone. My name is Lynsey, and I'm joined by my colleagues, Magda, Femke, Veronica, and Steve, who may appear through the chat. We are hoping to stay within our 10 minutes, and we have drawn on just once we can change the slides, if that's okay. Sorry. Thank you. And so we are drawing on a clinical communication tool, the SBAR framework, which stands for situation, background, actions, and recommendations or response. We've slightly tweaked it for our own purposes, and hopefully it'll help with flow of today's chat. We'll begin by providing a definition of what we mean by the term learning mentor. So, for us, we see it as being fundamental to the purpose of our role to nurture a sense of belonging and mattering for each individual student within the context of the wider programme. And this is something that can be particularly challenging within online postgraduate education. We acknowledge that there are various organisational terms, including cohort lead, and we recognise the opportunity to embrace the shared qualities and responsibilities of each of these roles that exist within our organisation. And how we actually embody in action these roles are actually what defines us. We use cohort lead admin pathways to create groups, and for us, that's usually up to 50 students. And then we focus on mentoring and cultivating relationships through dialogue and ongoing communication so that we can understand individual development goals and learning needs of our students throughout their time on the programme. And for us, this is what defines the learning mentor role, and I'll hand it over to Magda. So we all know that some time ago the university moved away from the personal tutor scheme, and after that, we experienced a lack of continued support for our students. So there was a role of cohort lead, but for postgraduate taught programmes, that meant that the programme director became a cohort lead for the whole cohort. So for our programme, that meant that I became the cohort lead for approximately 200 students. So even though building the community is still essential part of our programme ethos, we wanted to make sure that the individual support is also presented. What we did, we will talk through that. So the learning mentor within the programme is actually assigned to every student as soon as they join. And we then work together as a team to make sure that the students can always get in touch with their learning mentors, but also that the learning mentoring included in every communication. So most of the student communication often goes through the programme administrators, and they make sure that the learning mentor is copied in any communication with the students or that they sign post them to the learning mentor directly. So by working together as a team, from programme administrators to academics, who are the learning mentors, we make sure that we give the students all the support that we can give them, really. Okay. Thank you, Femke. I'm going to talk about the role of the learning mentor in the context of community building and our efforts to support students as they transition into clinical education programmes. And as Lindsay has mentioned, engaging with an online programme can be a struggle for PGT students. The cohort is a diverse global group of healthcare professionals who are at various stages in their careers. And there are hierarchies within the cohort. And the power imbalances, and that can make participation daunting for some. So our immediate goal is to ease the transition to postgraduate taught, and this involves creating an inclusive, supportive learning environment where every student can find their voice. We work to cultivate a strong sense of community and connection across the programme and create spaces where students can share their experiences and ideas. And we work to create a safe environment where students are willing to take risks and have their ideas and preconceptions challenged. Now, you will know that not all students are comfortable with this, and to support them and enhance their willingness to engage within an online community, we have adopted a compassionate pedagogical stance, and this involves a sensitive, supportive, encouraging approach. So we want every student to thrive and have the confidence and ability to exploit the learning opportunities that we create. And what we want to avoid is students exiting our programme at the end of the academic year feeling as if they have been through an ordeal. Yes, they may gain an academic award, but overall, their experience has been difficult. So this is where the learning mentor comes in. So the learning mentor can do a number of things. So they can set aside dedicated time for students to engage, to talk, and share concerns, especially when they're under pressure. So it can be very difficult for our students to combine full time clinical work with part time study and home life and caring responsibilities. And the learning mentor can help normalise that aspect of the student's busy timetable. The learning mentor will, as Lynsey suggested, promote belonging, and we can cultivate academic skills with our students, but the focus is on broader skills such as time management and organisation. So, for example, the learning mentor can support students and encourage them to engage with formative assignments. And I think for me personally, one of the really valuable things about a learning mentor is they can help set expectations for students. So we want our students to understand that postgraduate study, it can be less about a high level academic achievement and more about growing their educator skill set and developing their educator identity. So put simply, the learning mentor will prioritise the students well being. They have the students back, and they are their anchor to the programme. And during induction week, when students may be apprehensive about the challenges of studying, we're able to introduce the learning mentor as the student's individualised support. Thank you. So I'm new to the programme over the past year, and coming in as a learning mentor was one of the biggest changes I've seen previous experience and one of the best. So we don't mark anonymously. Because it would kind of be spurious. I have a speech and language therapist. I have a veterinary veterinary scientist, I have nursing educators. I know their professional setting. We ask them to draw on their professional setting, describe their professal setting, describe things. So it would be meaningless for them to be pseudo anonymous. And we give the same marks. We mark their work across all three modules in the first year. One of the things we do is there's a sort of feedback chart there, which we ask them to engage with each other's work. And we then give feedback as well on formative work. One of the things I did as well was go through this myself, you know, comparing my feedback against my peers in a new feedback culture and then able to pass on to my students, okay, it really helps. It's really worth it. You learn loads by comparing your work with others. So we are still reflecting on what's happening, and we prepared at least a few slides to show you some examples. But what we would like to jump into straightaway is the feedback, the students voice that came to us about what we are doing. And this was beautifully visible through a teaching award nomination, where our students told us that what they really like about the learning mentor is that this is a person who is approachable only an email away. But also, this is a person that they can share their concerns with without the fear of being judged. So What we would like to do through this role is actually empower our students to be able to build their voice, but also respond to their concerns and stay student centred, which means that, as beautifully stated by a student, we want to make our students achieve their work, their best work. So we want to be adaptable as well. So as we are running to the end of the time, if we can come back to the question. Very finally, we asked, how can a shared programme ethos and structures create meaningful dialogue? Well, we would suggest that this is through the adoption of a compassionate approach. So we all work to create dynamic learning environments, and we all know that confident students with a strong sense of self and robust self efficacy are critical components of vibrant learning spaces. These students bring something to the learning environment, and they're willing to take risks. But we also know that many of our students struggle and they lack belief. They are diffident, and they have yet to find their voice. So we believe that what is required is a compassionate, sensitive, supportive, encouraging approach to build students self efficacy and bolster their confidence. And we want all of our students to thrive. And we would suggest strongly that to facilitate a compassionate approach, we need learning mentors to offer targeted personalised support for students. So We acknowledge the need for consistency across programmes, but we would suggest that this should not mean that our students do not receive the support that they need to find their voice, and we propose this should come from a dedicated academic member of staff. So we advocate for learning members as key members of an ecosystem of support that includes cohort leads and student advisors, and the learning mentor role does not exist in a vacuum. Thank you. Okay. So over to Group two for our second presentation, who I think are going to do a panel. This is very exciting. Okay, thank you so much for coming our session. So we are staff and students from PGDE Secondary programme at Moray House School of Education and Sport. And I probably just introduce very briefly first. So I'm Mathematics Lecturer from the PGDE secondary programme. I'm Russell White. I specialise in design technology education. I'm Steven McLeister. I'm lecturer in education with geography specialism, and also programme director. I'm John Waddell. I'm a history PGDE student. And I'm Sophie Wilson, so I'm a biology student. Okay, so today is the one we want to share. So our topics in terms of student voice. So we see student voice partnerships not only mechanisms for change. So then we will use like a panel discussion. So we are not going to do some presentations. This is the only slides we have. So I'm going to ask some questions about our panels now. So then I will start by exploring a staff experiences. So my first question is for Steve, as a programme director for PGDE secondary programmes, could you just help our audience so maybe they haven't really heard this programme before and know what PGDE programmes is, and also, could you just let us know how do you interpret and work with student voice as part of programme development? Okay, so the PGDE is a professional graduate diploma in education. Basically, it's a qualification you need in Scotland to become a secondary teacher. So we've got 13 different subject areas. We've got about a core tutor team of 22, 180 students this last year, and 18 weeks were spent on campus and university, 18 weeks on site based learning in secondary schools. So in terms of the second question about sort of how to conceive student voice, First of all, the first thing is we take a relation approach to teaching. I often speak about the workshops being the development of a community of practice, where students aren't just learning from a tutor, but they're learning from each other. Tutors are learning in that process as well. So in terms of building those strong relationships, that's the basis for student voice, and that is a line with responsive teaching, where we can respond to the needs of individuals and the group as we go. I don't have time for examples. The second thing when I took over as programme director, I didn't want to be looking at that whole cohort questionnaires. So what I did was I basically gave that responsibility to COs who gave the responsibility to tutors. Every tutor is encouraged twice a year to engage in dialogue with the tutor group, that they summarise that, take that feedback on board, summarise it, give them the CO, the course organiser, who then summarises that. And what I get is a summary from each course organiser. And that's everyone's involved in the student voice process. And we also have SSLC we try and create open dialogue, sit in a circle. I am not alone. It's all my responsibility. I refuse to be the chair. As programme director, it's another staff member, and the agendas are obviously student led, but we'll move on. Yeah. Thank you. That's really helpful. So that's building a lot so we can see communication is a key issues in this partnership process. So then my next question is for Russell. So from your perspective, from a staff perspective, what makes communication with students So feel like a partnerships rather than simply managing expectations. So could you give us example where, for example, student feedback could not immediately lead to a change and how the communicate back to students. So this idea of a partnership, when we believe that education and teaching and learning shouldn't be something that happens to the students. And as has been discussed probably a lot today, is this idea of relationships being central to good teaching and learning. Essentially where needs are met, learning happens better. As another term that great to hear earlier in the previous presentation, this idea of as a tutor group, having our students back That seems like a really simple basic term, but I think it's really important, and programmes like the PGDE programme are intense. They are difficult, they are hard. It's a bit of a roller coaster. So this idea of partnership comes or is enhanced by students knowing that you're looking out for them, identifying where things could be difficult and ensuring the appropriate support. So this idea of having their backs, yes, basic statement, but I think, really, really powerful. This idea of listening to our students student voice, that doesn't just come through in the surveys in the SSLC. That comes through in our daily teaching. The idea being that, you know, behaviour is communication. If I walk into a class and certain people have changed their behaviours or there's something not right, I will react to that. So this idea of student voice being part and parcel of our teaching is really important. So it's not just what they say in surveys, it's them all types of communication that we can react to because we often know student groups really quite well due to the structure of the programme. And this idea of how do we communicate to students when we can't make a change immediately, I think the pushback, as we sometimes call it when we're responding to students, is actually really important. We won't agree with everything. We can't enact everything they suggest, but that discussion and the dialogue that comes through when we say this can't happen or it shouldn't happen adds for greater discussion, adds for greater understanding. And sometimes students will kind of say, actually, we now understand. So that productive conflict that productive conflict, I think is really important in that dialogue. Um, and lastly, when we're having sometimes productive conflict or disagreement or if we say we can't do something, again, when it can be done face to face, as opposed to an email, that discussion, that dialogue really helps. Okay. I think that's really useful so that we can talk about how we are going to how we do the partnership, how we build a partnership process in a good 30 minutes. But anyway, I think probably we got 10 minutes. I need to now I just turn to the student feedback now. So, John, my first question for you, so I think that's really important. So we want hear students voice student need to feel safe to say. So from your point of view as a students, so that's what a And so for example, like, how do you feel? So helps, for example, what helps or hindrance your sense of psychological safety when you give feedback and what student voice we say what we call partnerships actually look like in practises for students. So I think me and Sophie are probably quite unique at this conference because we're both training to be practitioners ourselves in education, and we are students at the University of Edinburgh at the same time and part of the SSLC for Moray House. And I think for psychological safety in that kind of environment, I would say trust has to be one of the first things that's established, and that might seem obvious. But We are trying to be practitioners, and the relationship that we've got with the staff are people who are supporting us, coming out and assessing us, and we are learning our own pedagogical practice at that same time. And when we are providing feedback, we are not always going to be wholly positive. It's going to be critical. It's going to be about this development that can take place. But we are turning to people who are mentors, our tutors, that we're building a relationship with. When we are then bringing them critical feedback, we need to see that they're going to take that in a positive way and that it's a good, strong relationship between the two. And I think the only way that, you know, to go into education and pedagogy, we need to see that critical feedback is taken positively, that is modelled early on so that when we come and say, these are experiences on placement, this is what we are going through. This is where we expect the university to be able to help us. That needs to be taken in a positive way. So I think it's just that basic thing in educational modelling that we see that when we provide critical feedback, that that's taken positively. While we're developing our practice and also have this relationship where people hold our entire future of our careers in their hands. If that's taken negatively, then we're not going to want to provide feedback. So that's an environmental thing, and that's a relationship that has to be built up over a very quick period of time, about ten months in the PGDE, and we're going to have professional relationships with these people going forward a very long time. Well, should we get jobs and become teachers. Big if. But that's, I think, an environmental thing. The environment of psychological safety has to be created and modelled. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, John. So then, Sophie, I think I will probably ask you the same question I asked John as well. So what do you think that student voice actually look like in the programme for students, could you just give us an example, particular example where you feel student voice was partnership? Yeah, so it's going to sound like Russell and John and I wrote our answers together. We definitely didn't. But I guess that just kind of reflects the strength of everyone's kind of mentality that we're all kind of the same page here. Yeah, you definitely do have to feel confident and comfortable that, you know, if I critique something about a lecture, Steve's not going to take my degree away. Um, but I've not felt like that in the whole kind of course, which is excellent. I think the kind of student representative experience is a great example of partnership where you go in thinking, Oh, I'm just going to give feedback, and they're going to listen. But actually, it's a lot more collaborative than that. It's a lot of discussion. It's not just, this is an issue. It's, okay, well, why has this arisen? How do we solve this? How can we avoid this going forward? And the kind of discussion we have between staff and students and also within the students at those meetings is really important. We're kind of encouraged to, like, think critically and think constructively about what we can realistically do. And it's the staff creating that kind of open and honest space. They're very transparent about limitations that they have within the course. No, we realistically can't do this. And like as Russell said, if there is something that's, like, a hard, this doesn't work, there's always an explanation. There's always a really clear open dialogue about why it doesn't work. And I think when you see your student voice being used to inform the decision making, of the course that you're on, it sends a really good signal to everybody that actually, we're not just here as like the token. I'm going to say something and then it's just going to get kind of wiped to the side, but you can actually see those changes happening. And in terms of thinking about how that works, there's just kind of a mutual respect in these meetings that the staff come with experience. You know, they've designed a high quality course based on professional standards, based on their own experience, and the students are coming with, you know, day to day experience from being on placement, being in class. But it's our responsibility as well to kind of critically engage with that education they're giving us and think, kind of honestly reflect about how it's actually going and how can we thoughtfully contribute to suggestions, not just saying, you know, willy nilly, I don't want any, like, assessments. You need to think, how is it going to benefit me? What can I actually do? That's going to be constructive in these kinds of situations, really. But I think, yeah, we can see even over the last few months, we can see our kind of suggestions being used to inform decision making on the course, which is quite special to be able to see it happening as you're going through the course, definitely. Okay, thank you so much for that. I think I probably run out of time. So we now welcome answer any questions.

So we have two presentations of 10 minutes and then a very, very short 10 minutes for questions. I'll try and keep us to time. So not to hold up time any further, we have our first presenter, who's Kejia, who's presenting on behalf of his team. Thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is Kejia Zhang, PhD student in the School of Informatics But today, I will present our work amplifying students voice to embed accessibility in computer science education. And this project was in collaboration with Aurora, Snigdha Cristina and Fiona also from School of Informatics. So in computer science education, the teaching assembly is different to the teacher accessible. So teaching assembly means equipping students with the knowledge, skills, and values to design the technologies that's inclusive and could usable for diverse population. So this is importance because accessibility is not the marginal issues. According to the WHO data, around one in six people worldwide experience some form of disability. And as a digital technology is part of our daily life now, so it can be either removed or create new barriers. Therefore, the computer science students need to understand accessibility as part of their professional practice because in the field, many of them will design system applications and services used by people with very different needs, abilities, and contexts. So by embedding accessibility into this education, we can help students think beyond technical functionalities and consider how their design decisions affect real users. So first we gather some insight through some studies. The first one we run studies through the PTAS project, mainly explore the perspectives on sails in learning assessment and curriculum designs, and we gather the perceptions from students, educators and external partners such as industry, for example, Teach Access, Skyscanner, and UserVision So here we list some key findings we get from students. So students actually want to learn the accessibility through the real life examples, and they want to see the lived experience connect to the real world problems. And they also valued authentic challenge that will connect to the real world problems as well as the opportunities to engage with the industry and professional perspectives. And another important point was that students want more hands on activities, and they also appraised the students lead initiatives where they could take ownership of their learning and contribute their own ideas. So in addition to the PTAS project, we're also doing co located workshops in the UK last years. The UKICER is a place for the researchers to share their research about computer science education. And our workshops aim to explore the challenge, opportunities, and practical strategies for how to teach accessibility in the CS. And in our workshop, we have 20 people attended and including educator, learning technologists, students, and some people from industry. Here's the QR code. So if you want to know more about the workshop descriptions, you can scan it. So after the workshop, we gather the insights we discussed in the workshop, and here are some key findings we list in here. So from the workshop, we learned that the accessibility is still often treated as a standalone or the optional topic. However, students engage more deeply when accessibility is embedded across learning experience and connect to the authentic real world activities. And living experience perspectives are also important because they help students understand the human impact of accessibility. Additionally, industry partners can make accessibility education feel more relevant to professional practise. Okay. So from these two studies, we gather some common sense, and based on these insights, we we did two early implementations. The first one, we integrate the accessibility training for teaching support providers in our school, and we design accessibility focused hackathons to let the children to solve the real world problems. So this is the first implementations, and in our school, the teaching support provides our students from undergraduate to PhD level who support the course instructor in teaching and assessment. And the training course run every semester, which includes 11 sessions. So based on the earlier insights, we integrate the accessibility into this training so that TSP could better understand how to support inclusive teaching, learning, and assessment. And after we did the accessibility training for the TSP, doing the surveys, and here are some key findings from our survey. So overall, the response stressed that the training increase the students who are the TSPs awareness of the accessibility when they're doing the teaching. And the other mentioned that they become more aware of inclusive teaching practise and support resources available to other students, not only for them. And this is our second implementations. So we designed the accessibility focused hackathons to engage students to address the real accessibility challenges by using or integrated AI into their solutions or the platform. And we design several activities during these hackathons. So at the beginning, they will introduce the really were challenged by hearing the people who has the disabilities, and at the end, they will get the feedback from the industry experts. And this helps them to develop their ideas in a more practical and realistic way. This is this year's hackathon. We start in February and run about four weeks. And we have over 100 students registered and half of them complete the whole process and submit their project, and five teams received awards. And in this year, we collaborate with Skyscanner, Google, UserVision and Teach Access, and other several working groups within our university. And here's one of the photo we take from the award ceremony. So after the hackathons we also doing the questionnaires, and this is some perceptions we get from the students and our partners. So from the student's perspective, so these hackathons helps them to learn re through the real needs and real problems. The student reports that hearing from the real people with lived experience was one of the major highlights of the event. And these hackathons also increase their awareness and confidence, and for some students it inspired further interest in accessive and accessible technologies. And from the industry and the community perspective, participants highlights the innovation and creativity of the students project. They also emphasise the value of the human centre accessibility where students start from the needs of the real people rather than treating the accessibility as an afterthought. Beyond the study we did, so we find we also saw the longer term impact of the hackathon. For example, some of the teams continue to work on their projects. Three of them published their applications on App Store, and one teams got funding from the Mastercard Foundations to further develop their ideas. And also a few of students, they voluntarily share their events in the hackathon on LinkedIn. To summarise, so through these hackathons, we learned student voice is the powerful driver of the educational innovation, and the authentic experience together with the industry and lived experience perspective can make accessibility learning more meaningful and engaging for them. And it also shows that students informed change can have a lasting impact when students are empowered to participate actively, they can become champions for accessibility and inclusion. And that's all from my presentation. Thank you. Thank you so much. We're just going to change our slides for our second presenter. Okay, we're going to have Jobran present for us on chatbots now. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, I'm Jobran I'm a lecturer in genetics education in the School of Biological Sciences. I'm here to talk about chatbots, which I originally designed for one purpose, but I can see that it has a broader purpose that is really engaging a wider student voice. So one thing is that I think we all are aware of is about getting authentic student feedback from the widest possible number of people is a very difficult thing to do. When we get feedback from students, we tend to get it through things like the SSLCs, the student staff liaison committees, which have the representative students for either that year or for those courses, and those students tend to be the ones that are outspoken, engaged, high achieving, and confident enough to come forward to give us their feedback. So what does that mean? Well, when we ask these SSLC the student reps about why isn't why aren't other students coming forward? Why can't we get feedback from more students? They tell us things about the students that are being too intimidated to they'll talk to the student reps sometimes, but they tend to be too intimidated to speak up during class, to come up to the professors or the lecturers afterwards, to send them emails. And often they're not even available for the times when we're trying to ask for feedback because they're working. This is a common thing that's happening, or they have other engagements. They have to cross campus or something else. So what does this mean? Well, this means that we're not obviously getting a representative voice of what the students are what the student bodies has to offer. And therefore, we are getting this biassed voice, and we're missing out on what the student voices really might actually be. So how do we address this? It's not an easy thing to address, but maybe here's one small way to do that. And that is this idea that I had about course specific chatbots, which students have reported are less intimidating. Than going up to their lecturers or their floor leaders to talk about that. And what the hope is is that it will capture students who are too intimidated to come up and ask questions. It will help accessibility for students who want that kind of help outside of hours and those who are not confident in their English language skills. Here's just one quote from one student who put this into one of my chatbots. This was a query. And yes, I'll let you have a moment to read that. But I think this is more common than we probably know, but we don't hear these voices because students are unconfident and not willing to come forward. So what do we do about that? Well, this person was willing to put this into a chatbot query, and so maybe that gives us a bit of So to start with, I'm going to talk a bit pretty generally about what a chatbot is, and then I'll talk about the chatbots that I use. So what is a chatbot? Well, a chatbot is like a large language model like Open AIs, Chat GPT or something like that. But it's designed to be focused on one source of information. So in this case, the source of information is a course guide for one of your courses or a very particular course in biology. And what it does is it cuts that up into pieces and puts it into the language that the large language models understand. And then what happens is then a student can ask a question, and it will go to that chatbot. The chatbots I created were called Biobots, and it'll say, Okay, based on the query that that student provided, what is the most meaningful information out of the database that we've created that I can use to respond to that chat bot? And you might think, okay, why don't you just why don't students just do this with ELM or Chat GPT or something else? Which, you know, they could do that. But the problem with those is that they're pre trained on the entire Internet. And so it's very hard for for the chatbot to say, okay, this is the very precise information that I should provide back. And that's important when you're providing information from a course guide because the course guide has very detailed information about assessment dates and times and those kind of things. And you don't want it to get those things wrong. So you have to focus it on one particular thing and say, Hey, only look at this thing, and that's what these chatbots are doing. So this is one of the this is the kind of a One of the things we want the chatbot to be able to do is answer questions. That could be questions about topics in the guide itself, the student guide. They could help students navigate university policies issues, data protection misconduct. It can assist with any number of things, study skills, and direct students to mental health places or other external things that either are in university of the university. You can do supposed to do all these things. What else? Other than answering these kind of questions about either things in the guidebooks or other lecture things, there's two different ways that the chatbot can interact. These are the kind of flavours you might say of it. One is just direct information retrieval. So says, Hey, when is this date, and it finds that particular date and it gives it back to the students, or it can act as a tutor where they ask questions, and it kind of guides them along with the student, the content of the course and say, Well, like you ask a direct question and then it gives you information to help you guide you to understand the course, and it's augmenting their learning somehow. Some other information. You know, it's secure. It's supposed to be anonymous with zero data retention, it's clickable hyperlinks and in multiple language, again, for the extra accessibility. Here's an example of what one of those looks like for a fourth year course, human evolutionary genomics. And you can see that there's a course guidebook, and they have it broken down by very specific content that they want the students to focus on so that the chatbot will only be trying to answer questions about that specific thing. Okay, so that's just general things. So where did we do this? Well, I implemented this in seven of the 38 courses. So that was a good chunk of the courses, and it was about 750 students, I think, which was almost so it's almost 75% of students in the school had access to the chatbots in semester one of last year, so quite a lot. And what you can see is it covers all the different years, and the number of queries in total were 2,645 queries that we got from students for either information retrieval or one of these tutors. All right. So when we do the analysis of the queries, what went into the queries and what came out of it, what we can say is that, you know, pretty common questions come out of it. And what you want is you want your chatbot to answer these kind of things correctly. If they ask something about, can I have a cheat sheet on the exam? You don't want it to make up something based on something else that's out on the Internet. You want it to be clear about that it's not found in the guide, what you found what you provided with it. So we'll ask these kind of things. And through this kind of exercise, what you can do is you can say, Oh, maybe we should be providing that information that's not in the course guide that, um, that we would like to tell students about. All right. So that's kind of what the bio bots do in general. How about coming back to the student voice? Well, one thing I could do is look at when the queries are made throughout the day and different times of the week. And I was able to determine that about 44% of those queries lay outside of the normal school working hours. So these are students who could ask a question of the chatbots and give a very detailed get correct response in very short time. They could ask questions that are native languages. We got about 1% of the queries were native languages, the most common being in Chinese and Spanish. So that was there was evidence that that was occurring as well. And then there was other questions about, you know, accessing students who would ask questions of the chatbot that we wouldn't expect them to ask of their lecturers about. Can you please explain to me what to do in tutorial four? I mean, you wouldn't expect many students to come up and just ask things about that, but these are the kind of things that we get. So I do think it was accessing a wider voice than we would normally get without a chatbot. Okay, so I'm going to skip over this. This is just the kind of thing that it would tell you. You could say, give me some advice on how to get this kind of grade, and it gives a pretty detailed advice about how a study plan for doing that kind of thing. All right. So what could we do? Well, one thing we could do is develop chatbots that are specific that I thought of getting for specific student feedback. It might be that students would be willing to give feedback. Wider participation of students would give student feedback where they wouldn't be able to normally. And this could hopefully reduce administrative burden and capture students again that were not capable of engaging wouldn't be engaged otherwise. All right? Is it worth it? Well, this is about how much it costs for the whole semester. So even if I upgrade it to a better model to make it a bit faster, easier, we don't expect that it would be that expensive. But, of course, there's a cost of students. We might be promoting things that we wouldn't want to promote like cognitive offloading, GenAI dependence. It may actually distance students that need real support from getting that support. And, of course, there's some cost of society that we should not ignore. They're working on making ELM a bit more sustainable, environmentally sustainable. But at this point, you know, it leads to environmental destruction and supports unethical companies. And if you're interested in that, you can help sign this open letter to the university to end contracts with open AIs and these kind of things, although they have recently signed another contract. But yes, that's all. Thank you.

So I want to welcome our wonderful student panel here. So I'm going to ask each of them to introduce themselves, and then we're going to kick off with some questions. All right. Do you want to start, Kate? Hi. Hi, everyone. My name is Kate. I'm the new Vice President Community at the Edinburgh University Students Association, and I have also been a student activist on campus for the past about 3.5 years. I was part of a feminist society called Girl Up Edinburgh. We're an intersectional UN affiliated feminist society. And that's been predominantly my experience in student voice throughout my degree. I studied social anthropology. And yes, that will be me and I will hand over. Thank you very much. My name is João Paulo Magalhães. I am a PhD student. I'm in my third year of the School of Social and Political Science, and I've been serving as a rep for PGRs in the last two years in different capacities, most recently as well at college level and at the doctoral college level. So I think it was important for me and for the work and path that I have to go through the different levels of representation and try to understand a little bit of dynamics within the university, which sometimes is a bit difficult. So it takes some time. And also I was a member of the Senate, which I served very gladly, and it was a very interesting role to play as well, Chris. Thank you. My name is Christopher Campbell. I am also a rep. I've been the school rep for physics and astronomy for a couple of years, and I've been a rep in various capacities for all five years of my degree. And I have in that time been on various committees and roles at all levels of the university. Yeah. Grand, thank you so much, guys. So I guess we've heard a lot today about kind of things like ideas that people are bringing forward, some best practice, some kind of yeah, just research people have done on student voice and how we can bring student voice into belonging, but also into representation and into other activities like curriculum development in the Uni. But I was hoping that we focus on action. Focus on what we can actually do with kind of if, you know, glass ceiling thinking, like, what's kind of the biggest possible thing that we could do, but also kind of with being realistic in the kind of next few days and months and weeks. So I'm asking you kind of a similar question I've just asked people here, which is, if you could see one thing changed in September for Student voice when you're coming back for your degree or for something else or the students after you, what would you want to see changed? I'm happy for anyone to go first. But, yeah. I think rather than one sort of systematic change, I think sort of, um, the culture and the attitude towards reps. I think often it's very good, but sometimes it's one of the things that gets sort of forgotten a bit or we're going to do student representatives as one of the afterthoughts. One interesting thing that I came across in some of my reading for this talk, which really resonated with me or for my previous talk was that reps really judge the value of their own role by how staff perceive their role, be that implicitly or explicitly. So by really showing that you value the role that reps play. They themselves will feel that they are playing more of a role. They'll be more interested in putting more effort into the role. They'll then achieve more things, and then they will again be happier achieving more things. You'll be happier, supporting them more, and you'll have a lovely positive cycle. So I think that sort of it really matters how you perceive reps, I would say. Um, yeah, and adding to that, I guess, September is really soon, so it's going to be difficult. But so just conceptually, I think as we heard today, and I'm not saying anything new, like, uh For our role is that we all want for us to be heard respected as well and to be sometimes effective. Sometimes we lose sometimes sometimes we don't. But we have to be effective somehow. And when that doesn't happen, especially when we go and we are facing hard times within the university, for example, it makes it creates sometimes cycles of distrust and creates our job more difficult. And sometimes even at a personal cost, I would say. So even for us, the reps, it's not easy because of the perception that we have, because we want to do a good job and sometimes we don't. So those kinds of aspects are very important. And I feel that it's normal for us to get frustrated sometimes. It's part of the job, I would say, but it's not normal for us to be very often frustrated. So I think finding the balances here is important. Of course, in a practical sense now. I have to speak more about the PGR side because one of the things that I felt in the last two years and I've been in the unit three years now, is that the PGR representation has been lacking or having some gaps. And I really feel that the PGRs and particularly the PhDs are a very important bridge between all the students and the staff and management and even professional services. And maybe one of the things that I would say immediately is that we need to clearly map the PGR the different PGR representation office that we have at multi level within the university. Find where those gaps are, find where it can be more efficient because most of us as students, this is a pro bono type of job, right? So we don't have we do this kind of labour sometimes, but we don't get paid for it. So to see where we can be efficient and also where we can have more added value. So I think that will be in practise one option. And just before handing out to kids, the last point that I want to make as well here, maybe not September, I'll a few months ahead. But I think it's very important for us to think about the position like a part time sub for a PGR representative for the university. I think it's something that has been discussed, as we discussed before for some time. Other universities hold that position. We are in a condition to advance for that position, and I think we more than ever need to think about that as well. So those will be my first supports. So I think for me, like, the biggest thing that I'd like to see is, like, greater consideration and action on the factors that impact access to student voice and barriers to students having their voices heard. So whether that's, um, Factors to do with the cost of living crisis, whether students are struggling with food security, if they're working part time jobs, full time jobs face gender based violence or homelessness and housing struggles. These are all things that take up time and energy and are very draining for students. And I think that those are huge barriers in actually being able to access spaces where students can have their voices heard in the first place. So I think really, I mean, I don't know if this will be possible in September, but, like, cultivating a culture where it's more normal to talk about these things and to acknowledge that students are facing these issues and to reflect on them and take action to support students. And I think like a great example of that is, like, the breakfast club that happens in EUSA and across the schools and the university because I think that really highlight, acknowledges and supports students who are struggling with food security and also finding their community and finding friends and people to spend time with. So yeah, I think it's just about that culture of openness around these topics, destigmatizing them, normalising them, and kind of like having these resources that support students to have their voice heard and to implement the feedback that we're getting from them on how we can best support them to access student voice spaces in the first place so that they're not just coming to university and kind of engaging with the bare minimum, but actually going further and engaging with how they can improve their own studies, what they would like to see, and how we can help them implement that into their university experiences and the experiences of the students to come in the future. Thanks. It's very interesting. It's very interesting. And, Kate, you are obviously here on the panel as kind of a person that wasn't a representative. And I think we oftentimes think of student voice as kind of the formal, like, traditional representatives that get elected and these kinds of things. But kind of coming from your perspective as a student activist, is there we often I think oftentimes in kind of the university, we see activists as like a disruption. Oftentimes, it's like a disruption of kind of things that are the status quo. And I think I was just hoping to get your reflections on how we can maybe reframe that and bring kind of also the activist perspective into student voice in the university. Yeah, I mean, I think, you're definitely right in terms of, like, activism can often be seen by the university as, like, a disruption. And I think it's really about kind of reframing what student activists want not as a disruption, but actually as, like, their real lived experiences and struggles that they face and kind of understanding that these systems that are in place, whether that's in the university or beyond, aren't necessarily working for students. And that ultimately, a lot of the time, as an activist, like, we don't initially want to have to disrupt things. Like, that's like the next resort, you know, like, we would love to just be able to communicate what we want to see changed and have that change without having to, like, protest or, you know, disrupt other forms of disruption. So I think it's about really taking, like what students are saying at, like, face value and understanding that those struggles are real and, like, trusting the change needs to happen and then kind of creating that change in, like, in a way that involves, like, co creation and listening to those students rather than, like, potentially isolating them and making them feel less connected to the issues that well, not less connected to the issues, less connected to the processes that are happening regarding the issues that they are facing. So yeah, I think predominantly just the student activists don't necessarily want to disrupt things, and, like, we're not doing that as the first resort, but really taking those experiences and using them with students to improve things. And so a lot of that is on perception, obviously. So kind of going back to Christopher as well, even so we see that, like, there's a certain perception of activists disrupting or kind of like when people kind of are active and raising certain issues that are that that perception may be a bit warped. So, Christopher, like, as you kind of were talking about that earlier, what are your reflections on that? First of all, is there kind of an action that people can take away from today to maybe change that thinking in their departments or in their schools? I think in a lot of places, the perception is with a lot of individuals. It's very good. I think during my time at Edinburgh, really the vast majority of the people I've worked with, it's been a pleasure. So I don't think it's necessarily, you know, everyone hates students, and we need to radically change all our thinking. It's more about partially that some people are not that, but also in the structure sometimes and in the way that maybe if you're acting with good intentions, explain that and why because it can be hard to tell, you know, we're not going to do this because we're not listening to you or we're not going to do this because we've thought about this. We've spoken to lots of previous students about this, and we came to the conclusion that this was the best way to do it. You need to give students enough information, and then you're going to also receive feedback. I'm thinking more now on the academic representative sides, but I think generally, you're going to receive suggestions and feedback that are more that are more sensible because, of course, if you give someone oversimplified information, you shouldn't be surprised that you receive in your SSLC completely oversimplified solutions. So I think part of that is really give reps the credit that we actually and I think activists say, Oh, we actually do want to work together and do these things. So help us give us tell us what the constraints are and why things are the way they are. And then we can say, okay, so this is why you haven't done, we understand, or we can say, okay, well, but maybe now we can make a suggestion. How about this small thing here, or that seems a small thing? Yeah, I think One thing that really makes a big difference is the networks that people have. It's massively important in these roles that you have a network both of students and staff. And this takes time. So can we incentivize people to be reps for longer for multiple years? And the way to do that is to make it a rewarding experience. If I feel like my feedback is valued and I'm not wasting my time, I'm going to want to continue doing this. If I feel like I'm speaking into the void and it's a complete waste of my time, well, I can think of better things to do. So I think really, you know, for concrete positions, maybe, invite your past programme reps to apply again in September and encourage them also to work as a group to collectively make the agenda for the SSLC. And you will find that your reps actually have a lot of ability to make really professional and in our we are the experts on student voice. We are actually able to spend time and really figure out what is a good suggestion here and talk about it in a proper academic way. I think I know I'm being quite long, but I'll make one final point. I think often we see reps as a as sort of basically consultees where we have a room of people, and it could be any other student as well. That's not really a representative role. It's more just we need some student input. And this is a role where I mean, there's space for that that is supposed to happen, but it's not really a role where you value the other person's critical judgement. It's where you want their input on what they like and they don't like, and then you're going to go off and make the decision. Reps, the point of reps is that especially if there is that they have the possibility to really spend some time on something to try and combine views together and become maybe experts on a particular part of the university's experience. And then they shouldn't be treated as just give us some view and then we're going to move on. That's a really helpful asset for someone you can work with and actually have a proper discussion with. This decision will still be made primarily by staff, but that's big use of reps as someone you can have a discussion on equal terms with. And so, João, you as a postgraduate research student, you very much kind of inhabit that space between kind of being a student, but also sometimes or, like, at least, like, people who teach as well are also sometimes seen as staff. So how does that interact? Or maybe could that be a bridge between what we are kind of seeing as the gap between kind of students and staff experience and voice and just your reflections on that space. Mainly because, again, we have we are facing difficult times, and I think that changed a little bit the perspective and the dynamics. And I honestly would say that the harder the times are or the challenging the times become more important the students voice. And there are some dynamics in terms of restructuring of the university that we Again, I've been here for almost three years, but according to other institutions, when we go and have this kind of restructuring, we tend to centralise things, and that centralization should be accompanied by centralization of student voice as well. It's very important. It's the layers that is very important. And I'm saying this because what I felt, according also to my colleagues, is that as a student, as a staff member because we are teachers, as sometimes researchers. So there is kind of a grey area in terms of definition sometimes, we were facing consequences from every site. So and that happens in different mechanisms throughout the year and university. So it's been sometimes difficult to actually navigate these aspects. And I want So one of the things that I think I shared and most of the colleagues share with me is that when we see this university in the long term, We see well, we see now, but we see also in the long term, is that we see a very important and relevant institution, academic institution. We are all here because we really like and most of people like to be in the University of Edinburgh. And I think that prestige and excellence, sometimes we tend to forget in the short term. And we as a PhDs again, because of that breach, because we are trying to do this research to move on between our studies and our professional careers, we tend to my colleagues, mainly the ones that are now finishing and want to engage in academia and continue academia, feel that they would see the University of Edinburgh as their home. They would like to see, but sometimes they don't. And that is because face all these challenges. But I want to say two things. The first one, it relates to activism. And that aspect, I think it's very important because it relates to what are the values and principles of our university. So I think freedom of expression and express ourselves in an academic environment, protected academic environment, I believe it's been always the point of defended by the university as an institution, and we don't have to disrupt anything. But we like to have our voices heard. And it's not only about the reps that we heard today. It's not only about us, but providing the mechanisms for people to express themselves the way that they want to express themselves according to the rules and the policies of the university, of course. But I believe that we fight to have that kind of freedom of expression. So that is one point that I think is very important for us to continue to preserve and uphold in terms of what these students voice because the times are difficult for the university, but are difficult geopolitically speaking, right? A difficult in terms of human rights speaking. So we have to understand those dynamics that are happening in the entire world. The second point relates to the incentives. So and I think it's more an individual aspect as well. But I spoke about the position of, for example, a part time rep for PGRs, but I think we can work and think about other type of incentives, both monetary, but not only just monetary that could help the reps as well doing their job or anyone that want to support the reps. Sometimes, again, this can be a very lonely job. Sometimes that kind of critical thinking, it's important to have a group of people. One of the things that we tried immediately to do within CAHSS and within SPS was to create a network of reps, and those reps to cross between PGRs, PGTs and undergrads as well. So try to have this kind of communication because we help each other. And I think that will be something important. So incentives that we create the structures and the mechanisms to allow people to also be confident and add that kind of critical thinking together, which is very important because we are not perfect, sometimes make mistakes. So but yeah, those will be my main points in terms of what we want now, but also, I think we have to think what we want in five, ten years and to understand the dynamics that's going the world and the university and try to adapt to those. Thank you. And as a kind of last quick fire around question for all of you guys, is what is kind of a positive thing you want people to take away today? Like a kind of best practise you've seen or a really good time where you felt heard, where you felt seen. These like kind of an example where you really felt like your voice was heard and also acted upon. I don't know who wants to start. I can start because I was No, I think we have an amazing community. I really think. I've been in other universities and academic structure. I feel really glad and that's why I played this role for two years. And I feel that we have strong mechanisms, and we just have to use them for the better. And these kind of events today really reflects what we can do, what we want to do. And just one point of the student councils that we have month Council, yeah. Every month. Every month, yeah. So those I think are, for me, one of the things that made me feel more integrated in the community. And also, it provides each one of us as a student to give to have a voice, not only for things that concerns us directly, but I think that is definitely a good practice that we should continue to work on because it is a space, a safe space and a powerful space for student voice. Chris. Yeah, so I think a positive thing. I think I'll be quite similar and maybe it's a bit of a cop up, but I think, yeah, the community and the people here, I think we have mostly just this whole conference, we've had people really thinking deeply about how to make complicated things better. And in many cases, it was mentioned this is not part of sort of your normal work allocation reps are doing this entirely as volunteers, most of us. So we really have a lot of people here who feel quite strongly about making things better. And I think that's really great. And I think Edinburgh is a what Edinburgh does really well is that could still do better, but I think does really well is that students and staff speak to each other. And we don't we have much less, I think, than some other universities, a feeling of elitism where staff are very reluctant to speak to students. So I think really that is a strength that we should lean into be willing to speak to each other and to listen to each other. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so I think for me, maybe a bit more of a specific example. I think something that's been really positive is seeing the work that's being done in the gender based violence working group, a little bit of context about I think it was about five years ago now. The feminist society collectively called for a better report and support system for victims of gender based violence at our university. And the result of that initially was a very difficult relationship between the university and these societies. And this started before I even started my first year. And throughout my time at university, we've now actually got to a point where we have a gender based violence working group, and we are working with members of staff in the university to really improve the support that we have for victim survivors and improve the support system and the reporting system for them. And I think that watching that has been really amazing, and it's been so positive to have been part of that, as well. And I feel very grateful to have been part of that. And it really gives me hope that we can go from difficult places to much more positive ones, and we can build those relationships to create positive change with students and with the university that will hopefully last for a very long time for students to come. Yeah. Well, thank you, everyone. Thank you to Christopher, João and Kate for joining us on the panel. I hope you got something out of that, something to take away. And yeah, thank you. Thank you to them.