If you’ve never been to an FFYE (First and Further Year Experience) Forum, here’s how I’d describe them – a warm, inviting and engaging environment full of opportunities to learn about the work of your colleagues, present your own work, and connect in our shared goal of creating an excellent experience for students at UTS. The most recent Forum was no exception, bringing together people from different corners of the learning and teaching community to discuss the theme ‘Enhancing Student Transition: A Focus on Relational-Based Strategies Inside and Outside the Classroom’.
It was easy to see how this theme was both timely and relevant for all of us, including staff and students from UTS and learning professionals and academics from other universities. It was a jam-packed two hours of learning and knowledge sharing, aided by plenty of opportunities to forge new connections in breakout room discussions, putting the theme of ‘relational strategies’ into action.
A keynote from Natalie Bradbury (Director of Student Experience)
We kicked off with an insightful keynote presentation from UTS’ Director of Student Experience Natalie Bradbury, who has recently joined the UTS community after 12 years at Western Sydney University. Natalie has a keen knowledge of essential support measures for students, having created the Western Success program (a data-driven, personalised intervention support process for students), as well as the Student Services Hub. Natalie introduced her team’s work by starting with the Student Experience Framework, describing the framework as a foundation for all of her team’s work. The importance of the framework was a key theme throughout the entire forum, showing that it is indeed the basis from which many of us start when thinking about the student journey at UTS.
You can explore the domains of the Student Experience Framework in more detail on the Student Experience Framework SharePoint site.
[We’re working toward] new solutions to reduce the overwhelm, reduce the cognitive overload, and set students up for success.
Natalie Bradbury, Director of Student Experience
While UTS starts from a solid place in terms student success (with pass rates at 2nd in state) and attrition and retention (3rd in the state), Natalie pointed to specific areas that the team are expanding to continue to enhance the student experience:
- Optimising onboarding communications – as a new student’s first impression of UTS, the onboarding experience is a crucial part of the journey. The Student Experience team are co-designing a new student-centred content strategy to streamline and simplify communications.
- Engaging with students at critical points – personalised, highly targeted communications for students who may be at risk of disengaging from their studies, such as students who do not access the LMS, or those who need to reattempt a subject. Work already completed by the team has shown that this approach is highly effective.
Learning about relational practices at UTS
Help-seeking does not come naturally. Help-seeking says ‘I’m a failure, I need help’. How do we get around that messaging?
Kathy Egea, FFYE Program Coordinator
Kathy spoke about our connections as the “glue” that holds our community together. The theory behind relational learning and teaching was explored in this recent blog post from by Lucy Blakemore (written with Kathy Egea and Alisa Percy).
From here, we jumped into breakout rooms to get to know some of these important connections within the FFYE community. Attendees could choose two different short sessions to watch in the time we had, which took place in different breakout rooms. The presentations for the student support domains were lead by leads in those areas, and supported by faculty academics in their role as faculty FFYE transition coordinators:
- Orientation and Transition – Rachel Yasimeh + James Wakefield, Business FFYE Transition Coordinator
- HELPS: Academic language and learning support – Simon Au + MaryAnn McDonald + Alicia Haines, Science FFYE Transition Coordinator
- U:PASS – Georgina Barratt-See + Amir Armanious, Business FFYE Transition Coordinator
- Accessibility – Dhara Sheth + Alice Murphy (for Julie Peterson) Student Wellness Program (Batyr)
- Financial Assistance – Nick Cooper + Paul Burke, Business FFYE Transition Coordinator
- Careers – Eva Chan + Luke Sharpe, FASS FFYE Transition Coordinator
- UTS Library – David Litting + Elizabeth Brogan, Health FFYE Transition Coordinator
- Student Learning Hub – Mandy Kalan + Lisa Lim, Connected Intelligence Centre
- Build Program: Leadership – Veronica Wong + Simone Faulkner, Business FFYE Transition Coordinator
- International Onboarding – Sophie Erpicum + Dush Thalakotuna, FEIT FFYE Transition Coordinator
- Jumbunna team (Tamatau Faleono, Neil Randall, Sallie Paternoster, Christine Vella and Kylie Garratt) + Francis Johns, Law FFYE Transition Coordinator
- Student Success Program (CSJI) – Stef Dourado + Lisa Billington, Law U@Uni coordinator
The range of breakout rooms attendees could choose from illustrated how far the support community at UTS reaches, and the many different connections students can make.
For the last part of the forum, we were able to select two breakout rooms from nine of the FFYE 2023 grant holders. The two sessions that I went to covered their grant approach, applying one or more curriculum principles of transition pedagogy , and the impact of their grant practice measured against the four dimensions of the Student Experience Framework. They reflected on lessons learnt, and how their practice could be transferred to other disciplines. An upcoming blog will explore the grant projects in more detail.
Seeds for change
At the end of the Forum, we circled back to the acknowledgement of country that Alisa Percy opened the session with, encouraging all of us to consider the ‘seeds for change’ we can bring to our own contexts.
We would like to open the Forum by acknowledging that UTS stands on the unceded ancestral lands of the Gadigal people, and we pay our respects to their elders past and present, acknowledging them as the custodians of knowledge for the lands, waterways, stories and songlines of this region. We also extend that respect to all First Nations peoples joining us today.
People, places, spaces, things, from an Indigenous perspective, these have always been entangled in a web of co-creation, known and shared through story. We might reflect on this as we hear some of our institutional stories today about relational approaches to teaching and supporting student learning.
We might want to think of relational pedagogy as drawn from a decolonial perspective, as an approach that questions who and what matters in higher education, an approach that acknowledges and actively attempts to dismantle uneven power relations, an approach that deliberately tunes into the lived experience of students and staff and attempts to build a different kind of relationship, one that enables authenticity, vulnerability and trust, cultural and psychological safety, and creates the conditions for all who enter the university to thrive.
We hope you enjoy the stories shared here today and find insights you can take back to your own contexts to plant the seeds for change.
Alisa Percy, Senior Lecturer in Teaching, Learning and Curriculum