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.