Becky Allen PG CERT

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Edwards, A. L. (1957). The social desirability variable in personality assessment and research. Dryden Press.

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Hooks, B. (2010). Teaching critical thinking: Practical wisdom. New York: Routledge.
(Teaching II – Democratic Education, III – Engaged Pedagogy)

Kara, H (2015), Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences : A Practical Guide, Policy Press, Bristol. Available at: ProQuest Ebook Central. [2 December 2024].

Kitzinger, J. (1994) The methodology of focus groups: the importance of interaction between research participants, Sociology of Health and Illness, 16(1), 103–121. Available at:  https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.ep11347023. [Accessed 4th November 2024]

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Orr, S, & Shreeve, A (2017) Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education : Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum, Taylor & Francis Group, Milton. Available at: ProQuest Ebook Central. [2 December 2024]

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Pew Research Centre (2024) Writing Survey Questions. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/writing-survey-questions/ (Accessed: 2nd December).

Sabri, Duna (2017) Students’ Experience of Identity and Attainment at UAL. Available at: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/14370/1/year%204%20report%20-%20%20final.pdf [6th November 2024]

Vaughn, Schumm, Sinagub (2013) Focus Group Interviews in Education and Psychology. Available at: DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452243641 [25th October 2024]

Zimdars, Anna & Moore, Joanne & Sabri, Duna & Jones, Steven & Higham, Louise (2016). What can universities do to support all their students to progress successfully throughout their time at university?. Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education. 21. 1-10. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305920973

Learning from Students: Defining the role of a Transition Tutor in Illustration Education

The Rationale behind defining this role is in order to:

• Provide access for all students to progression by supporting attendance and access to the studio
• Create equal opportunities for all students through greater inclusivity
• Learn from the students and what they teach me about progression, accessibility and Inclusivity.

Longer Draft Available here

FINAL PRESENTATION

• There needs to be clearer communication of my role and that of the other Transition Tutors.
  
• I need to address the content of the Progression Workshops to be more inclusive. I will use a future focus group with a wider range of voices to establish areas I can cover that sit outside my cultural awareness

  
• Create a more welcoming studio environment for the Progression Workshops. This includes creating a quiet and comfortable space.

  
• Continue to be in touch with students through focus groups to find out what their needs are for progression. Ensure sampling includes a broad range of voices.
  
• Transition roles need to adapt to the needs of each year group and keep developing this with Transition Team.
  
• I need to be more assertive in communicating what my role is and establish what students can approach me for.
  
• Continue to define and co-create the role with students.

I have cross referenced by questionnaire and focus group responses to identify the key points that summarise my project findings:

• Transition Tutors
  65% of students hadn’t heard of a Transition Tutor. Comparing this with the focus group feedback, the role of a transition tutor has not been made clear, and students are not aware of what they do. 59% of students did not know what the role of Transition Tutor is.
  
• Progression
  Students seemed clear on what this means: ‘Careers. next steps, further education’. 38% of respondents mentioned ‘Future’ in their comments. 94% of students found the workshops useful (16 out of 17 students.) Those students all wrote comments about why they were helpful. These are the most common words used in those responses:

• Progression Workshops
  35% of students noted that there were missing elements from the progression workshop. Half of these suggestions were related to staff or alumni examples. This was supported by the focus group responses and my own observations during the Progression workshop. The main elements that were found useful included: Assertiveness technique, pushing students to think about the future, reduced feelings of stress about the future, demonstrated a variety of choices for careers, group activities gave better sense of community.
  
  Suggestions for improving the progression content was to include: ‘Real-life’ experience from Tutors and Alumni, practice interviews, CV writing, networking events, business guidance for employed and self employed, job awareness and 1:1 sessions. When asking about progression needs, students mentioned: increasing students knowledge of job roles available to them, more live brief opportunities, and awareness of outside connections to UAL.
  
  Feedback also indicated that the progression workshops were not relevant to all students, especially those who have progression plans away from illustration. International Students noted that they need more time to catch up with the workshop content and that the advice given during the workshop was not suitable for international students moving back home after graduation.
  
  A majority felt that they would benefit from more progression workshops (88%).
  
  
  Other wider areas of feedback:
  
• Tutor Roles
  Transition Tutor: Students were unaware of our roles throughout course and don’t remember being introduced to them. They didn’t know they could approach transition tutors and not sure what they would ask them.
  
  All Illustration Tutors:There were positive response for how tutors can support progression , that included: Talking to tutors about plans for the future can offer more detail or make plans more clear, group conversations with tutors were helpful for sharing ideas.
  Negative views included: Disconnection with tutors and difficulty building relationship, approachability of tutors is hard. Tutors are punitive and not constructive and need to be kinder.
  
  
• The Studio
  When students were asked about what might prevent them from accessing the studio, the responses encompassed the feeling the studio was not welcoming, comfortable or cosy. Noise was reported to be an issue and requests for quieter spaces was also made. A communal space was mentioned, that would help students feel that they belong on the studio and would be an incentive to stay longer throughout the day.
  
  
• Student Needs
  When asked about feeling comfortable speaking up in the studio, those who didn’t mentioned their anxiety was the reason. Many students brought up the topic of neurodiversity and how that has been addressed in the studio space: creating a space for those with SEND that is consistent from year to year.
  
  Students have expressed that the situation of international students needs to be taken more into consideration. This needs to be explored further, particularly in relation to making progression workshops relevant.
  
  In terms of studentship, students found the following situations helpful in the studio:
• Sharing common problems and searching for the way out [progression plans]
• Share suggestions with other students is very useful for my work.
• Talking to students from different countries provides different view[points] for me.
• Talking to others who share same passion
  
• Social Desirability Bias
  I am now more aware of this as a term and how it may affect the authenticity of a student’s response when asked for feedback from a Tutor or person in position of power. It is my aim to make students feel as comfortable as possible in the studio environment and when talking to tutors.
  
• Flexible role of Transition Tutor
  Transition team meeting discussed the need to define roles for each year in adapt with each new cohort.
Each cohort brings new challenges. When speaking to students through focus groups and questionnaires, I noted some conflicting ideas and opinions; this means that as a transition tutor we need to carefully listen to students voices and seek out the ones we can’t hear to understand the needs of the group. Students also seemed unclear on what they wanted from a Transition Tutor, and so this means I need to be more assertive, along with my team to define the role and take suggestions from the students – we need to co-create the role together.

In order to analyse my data, I have used transcription of both oral and written feedback, digital data sets from questionnaires with a thematic categorisation of responses. This data can be found in the following locations:

Written Short Questionnaire Responses
Digital Questionnaire Responses
Focus Group Feedback

I have also consulted the Discover Uni website for published findings from the NSS feedback and data, that has provided insight into final year and alumni perspectives on progression. This can be found here.

In receiving feedback from students through 2 different questionnaires, I have used a mixed methods technique in order to enrich my findings (Kara, 2015). For the first short questionnaire I transcribed written responses according to theme in order to categorise similar points within groups. This helped me to establish the main focus areas in response to the questions. The second questionnaire was made available digitally to students and the majority of responses were recorded quantitively. I thought it was important to offer a different type of questionnaire to appeal to students with greater digital literacy and give them a sense of more anonymity in that they could complete this remotely. It also gave students who may need translation software a chance to read the questions privately in a different language. This questionnaire also made use of content analysis, with the option for students to offer typed feedback. The digital form was able to highlight the frequency of repeated words which gave insight into the meaning of the responses. Combining both qualitative and quantitative aimed to ‘to address a research question from a variety of perspectives’ (Kara, 2015) resulting in a more comprehensive overview of the feedback.

Analysing the results from a focus group was a new experience for me and to record responses efficiently and accurately was quite a challenge. When holding the focus group I recorded the feedback using an audio recording device, so that I could return to check my written answers at the time matched up with genuine feedback. I organised the data by each question asked, and listed the answers that were provide by the group.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was hoping to embody the 5 benefits identified by Hess (1968), and I think elements of each one were present at times which I have identified here:

‘1. Synergism – this could be seen in the wider topics that were pulled in to discussion, and this raised further questions around the course.
2. Snowballing – students tended to gather momentum once one person had spoken up, which led to more issues being raised and greater insight.
comments),
3. Stimulation – animated responses were noted in response to some questions, and this tended to be when negative issues were raised.
4. Security – the responses seemed honest and genuine, especially as at times the feedback addressed topics of a sensitive nature.
5. Spontaneity – different students spoke up at different times depending on the question

I noted that my focus group particpants (7 in total) presented as a small, familiar social group. Although there was a benefit to this in terms of Hess’ ‘security’ characteristic as there was an observed social ease, this sample of students could only represent a number of views on the questions being asked. In future, the sampling needs to bring in a more diverse range of participants in order to achieve a more accurate result. This is reflected in Parker and Tritter’s conclusion of ‘more critical attention paid to sampling issues and a greater consideration of the epistemological impact of focus group composition’ when discussing focus groups. (Parker & Tritter, 2006).

That said, there was spirited discussion around the topics mentioned and it is ‘this dynamic nature which is at the heart of focus groups and which endows them with the power to generate insight often negated by other methods’ (Parker & Tritter, 2006). Therefore I think the focus group was successful in generating lots of useful feedback, however it is limited by the narrow scope offered by the sampling.

Throughout this Action Research Project, I have been gathering information from students in order to find out how my role can be more supportive towards their progression throughout 3rd year BA Illustration. My previous research tasks have included 2 different types of questionnaire and and a focus group whose respondents have comprised mostly of students who are more present in the studio and confident vocally during group discussion.

An important aspect of my research, is to acknowledge the quieter voices and hear from those who do not attend workshops or the studio often if at all. Through this research I would like to found out why this might be happening and what can be done to support all students attending progression workshops. Therefore, a new aim is to find more of a balance between my respondents for a future focus group, as the previous group demonstrated signs that they came from a small friendship group. The differences in social characteristics between individuals in the focus group can be significant for understanding their interaction when giving feedback. (Parker and Tritter, 2006)

‘Issues of sampling and selection are likely to prove crucial in relation to the form and quality of interaction in a focus group’
(Parker and Tritter, 2006)

My previous focus group was approached for response through ‘piggybacking’ (Kreuger and Casey, 2001) on a year group event, a trip to Dungeness. For a future group, I have reflected I will use a different year group session, such as the Monday Lectures, to recruit participants, changing my approach to ‘recruit on location’ (Kreuger and Casey, 2001). To create a randomised sample, I will place coloured post-it notes on the seats of 12 chairs in the Peckham Road Lecture theatre to select students. Responding to suggestions from the last focus group recruitment, I would present the invitation for the post-it note students at the end of the morning session and invite them to speak with me during the last part of their lunch break. Students informed me that as they had an afternoon session following the lunch break, they would be more inclined to use this in between time to talk to a tutor. In selecting 12 students originally, I will aim for around 6 – 8 people to turn up as an ideal group size (Kreuger and Casey, 2001).

The aim of using a more random sample of students is to enable feedback from a broader range of students with a number of positions or views that capture the majority of the participants’ standpoints (Parker and Tritter, 2006). Therefore a future focus group can include students who have not responded previously to call outs for feedback, so their voices can also be heard.

I noted this diagram from the research paper ‘What can universities do to support all their students to progress successfully throughout their time at university?’ that I found insightful for understanding the impacts on a students journey, and what can be done to support more equal progression:

This paper shed valuable light on the importance of understanding a student’s progression holistically and how ‘universities can make a difference through interventions, for example, by focusing curricula and learning, extracurricular engagement, and building supportive social relationships’ (Zimdars, Moore, Sabri, Jones & Higham, 2016). I took from their list of conclusions a number of suggestions that I aim to reflect on and integrate within the progression element of my teaching:

• ‘Expanding ways resources and good practice can be shared. E.g. creation of a well-advertised one-stop website linking the range of resources available and/or create new oppor-tunities for sharing and support.
• Actively encouraging applications and outreach to increase the representation of those from under-represented groups to all professional and academic jobs and, in particular, senior positions.
• Encouraging approaches that view staff, students, and managers as partners learning from each other to enhance outcomes for students.
• Encouraging peer-support between students and developing student networks and groups.’
  
  (Zimdars, Moore, Sabri, Jones & Higham, 2016)

In summary, through holding a focus groups, I have learned a lot about how students respond to call outs for feedback and how to mediate these types of feedback sessions. From this experience, I can see that my focus group has only reached a small sample in the third year, and therefore I need to expand the outreach to get in touch with those who do not attend or speak up. This Action Research Project has definitely opened my eyes to embracing and understanding the voices of students, but also comprehending that silence can also indicate a valuable point of view that may be hidden.

‘teachers must be open at all times, and we must be willing to acknowledge what we don’t know’ (hooks, 2010)

To gain further insight into why students may not be attending Progression Workshops I have been tracking attendance throughout Term 1 and over all 5 progression workshops so far. As the workshops are from morning to afternoon, I take attendance twice: at the start and after the lunch break. This allows me to see not only who doesn’t show up, but who leaves before the afternoon session.

The reason for this tracking, is primarily to encourage students to attend, and to offer any support to help them access the session. Through personal, follow-up emails, I hope to gain an understanding of why students cannot attend, and how I can help them benefit from the content through different strategies. This was not a way to gain data and therefore did not ask for consent to share this information, so will not detail any specific or identifying responses for ethical reasons. Instead I will outline how I responded to the varying reasons that came to light.

It is also worth mentioning, that approximately 50% of students did not respond to the personalised email and so new strategies of how to contact them need to be developed. The majority of responses from those that did respond encompassed reasons around illness.

It was also noted that the a much higher proportion of International students left before the afternoon session, and so only experienced half of the workshop. This could be explained by some of the anonymous feedback on workshop content:

• Sometimes workshops aren’t very helpful or relevant to my project
• International Students may need more time to catch up with workshop content
• Progression advice not suitable for international students moving back home after graduation
• No progression advice for students who don’t want to do illustration
  (From: Short Questionnaire Responses)

This drop off could also be explained by ‘the real-life’ problematic’, as there can be ‘issues with creating or recreating the environments of working life within an educational setting’ (Orr & Shreeve, 2017). When I consider this, I wonder if students question the university environment’s capacity to replicate a professional environment within the progression workshops? In these, we often talk about ‘real-life’ situations as being different from educational experience:

‘The distinction between ‘real life’ and education is always present in some form in spite of individual tutor’s actions to develop approaches to teaching which seek to convey or inculcate disciplinary ways of thinking and being.’
(Orr & Shreeve, 2017)

I also observed student feedback during the session, and noted that 3 students mentioned that when myself and my colleague (Year 3 Illustration Tutor) related professional guidance to our own working experiences, they became more engaged in the session, by feeling more of a connection to the information we were teaching. This suggests that teaching ideas around professionalism for after higher education may need real-life examples to feel less ‘unreal’. This is reinforced by the teaching strategies of signature pedagogies by ‘using examples from practice’ and ‘bring in your own work’ as a teaching strategy.

In summary, I have been quite speculative about attendance drop off or reasons why students may not attend progression workshops, which suggests I need to gather more information form the students directly on this. Some of the feedback gathered already gives an indication that some content may not be relevant for a number of students, and that the workshop may feel disconnected from ‘real-life’ experience, as it is inherently a taught session in an educational environment. There is a small amount of evidence that bringing in examples of tutors and alumni experience can support the students’ feeling more connected to the content.

I brought my research and feedback to a bi-termly Illustration Transition Meeting with my colleagues George Mellor and Dan Freeman to ask their for their advice and responses. The main points I raised after reflecting on my focus group feedback were:

• Implement progression early on – Progression workshops should start with year 1 and run into year 2 as well.
• Make students aware of outside things connected to UAL
• Invite previous Graduate Diploma students coming to speak to current students
• Build confidence for our next steps for ‘who we want to be’ [career options]
• Introduction to Transition Tutors at beginning of each year
• Inform students on what Transition Tutors are for

I took these points and my wider feedback from students to my colleagues and discussed the next steps on how this can inform our roles and teaching. The main thing we noticed is that our roles may not be static from year to year, as each cohort brings a fresh perspective, different experiences and presents certain challenges. For example some of these include:

• Cohort size ranging widely from 75 to 150 students between years
• Impact of cost of living on student experience and learning
• Impact of Covid Pandemic
• Neurodiversity
• Global Issues

Therefore we agreed to take on a more fluid approach to our roles, keeping with our core principles to guide the student journey from year 1 through to 3, and consistently reflecting on the current cohorts to see how we can use our teaching time to support their needs.

The meeting helped me to gain on insight into how I can respond to student feedback and implement some changes in the transition/progression delivery. I plan to work on this and build these suggestions into my delivery over the coming months:

• Work with the other transition tutors to include progression style activities in a subtle way to year 1s and 2s – they were cautious of talking about careers too early as felt students may not be ready.
• Make students aware of outside things connected to UAL e.g Add opportunities to the weekly newsletter (perhaps create a progression section? But name it something more exciting than ‘Progression’!)
• Create a space in the timetable for peer-led activity for students to work on progression activities.
• Invite previous Graduate Diploma students and alumni to talk to students about their experience of gaining a BA in Illustration and what they went on to do. Find a wider scope of disciplines that not only includes different types of illustrator, e.g. set design, writer…
  This aims to respond to the students need of ‘what careers are out there that I can do?’
  The challenge with this will be to source a budget to accomodate visiting speakers.
• Build confidence for students planning next steps for future roles by enacting more peer-led activities.
• Introduce Transition Tutors at a welcome event at the beginning of each year. Add our titles to the staff noticeboard with a break down of our role.

I added a more detailed questionnaire to the end of the last 2 progression workshops to gather further information from students about how they understand my role and the workshop content. This was accessed and completed online through a QR code. Out of 30 students across the 2 groups, I received 17 responses.

The response breakdown can be viewed here.


Here I will highlight what I have learned from the students:

• I now have greater insight into how the progression workshop is useful to students. Here are some of their responses:

• Insight into what the workshop might be missing:

• Only 65% of students have heard of my role Transition Tutor, with only 59% being aware of what they do.
  
• 88% of students found the Progression booklet useful for the session and 94% found the workshop helpful overall.
  
• I was also made aware of ‘social desirability bias’ (Edwards, 1957) when a student asked me how to answer the questions in a way that would benefit me as the researcher. I found this a bit surprising as I had encouraged the students to answer the questions honestly, and empahsised that all responses were valued in order to benefit the course and their experience. However I understand that they may want to ingratiate themselves with me as their tutor:
  
  ‘One other challenge in developing questionnaires is what is called “social desirability bias.” People have a natural tendency to want to be accepted and liked, and this may lead people to provide inaccurate answers to questions that deal with sensitive subjects’
  (Pew Research Centre, 2024)

This is what I have learned about creating and disseminating questionnaires:

• Adding the questionnaires to the end of a teaching session greatly helped with student response rate.
• Creating a QR code for students to access questionnaire immediately through their own mobile device was successful. I observed most students from the session doing this.
• I found that students may be more willing to respond to positive wording and prompts than negative ones:
  There were few responses (13%) to ‘Is there anything that prevents you from speaking up in a group situation?’ rather than a much greater response rate (59%) to ‘What might make you feel more comfortable to speak up in a group situation?’.
• I am now aware of ‘social desirability bias‘ and will take this on board moving forward with gathering responses to encourage students to answer truthfully. One suggestion from the Pew research Centre is that this can happen more when an ‘interviewer is present (e.g., telephone and face-to-face surveys) than when respondents complete the survey themselves (e.g., paper and web surveys)’ (Pew Research Centre, 2024). Moving forwards I will address my physical presence in survey situations.
• I could diversify the types of questions such as adding multiple choice and ranking options to create more engagement (Converse, Presser, 2011). From observation I could see that most students accessed the QR code displayed to answer the survey (through mobile device), however only 57% of students actually completed it. This makes me question if there was an engagement drop off during the answering part.