Five facets of the Student Voice
Introduction
Teaching Matters’ series in March-April explored the various avenues the student voice is being recognised, heard, supported and explored at the University. In their introductory post↗️ to the series, Marianne Brown (Head of Student Analytics, Insights and Modelling), Nichola Kett (Head of Quality Assurance and Enhancement) and Sam MacCallum (Students’ Association Vice President Education 2022/23) define student voice and discuss its various facets. Sam defines student voice as:
“making sure all decisions, big and small, that impact students are taken in partnership with students.”
This concern about including students in the University’s decision-making process takes shape through a wide array of tools available to the student body such as student surveys, the student panel, student representation, along with course feedback and programme review.
In this newsletter, you will find five of these facets identified through the March-April Student Voice series↗️:
- Facet 1: Horizontality,
- Facet 2: diversity,
- Facet 3: belonging,
- Facet 4: representation,
- Facet 5: processual.
These are followed by our regular features: Collegiate Commentary, In Case You Missed It (ICYMI), and Coming Soon at Teaching Matters! If you'd like to keep up with Teaching Matters, make sure to sign up to our Monthly Newsletter Mailing List↗️.
Five facets of the Student Voice
Facet 1: Horizontality
One key facet of student voice rests in the idea of horizontality, or partnership. Indeed, the basis of student voice being to include students in all decisions and making sure students get a ‘seat at the table’ alongside staff members, regional and national organisations. One example is how the Quality Enhancement Framework in Scotland is founded on the basis of student engagement. In their post ‘Quality and the Student Voice↗️’, Nichola Kett (Head of Quality Assurance and Enhancement) and Megan Brown (Development Consultant, Student Partnerships in Quality Scotland – sparqs↗️) explain how student voice is involved in quality:
“What this looks like in practice is that students are involved not just as information providers, giving intel on their experiences to the institution, but are jointly involved in designing the methods of feedback, analysing the data, identifying issues, and working with the institution to develop action plans and deliver solutions. Through this approach, students are empowered to make changes at their institution through authentic and constructive dialogue with staff, recognised as equal partners in the process and supported to engage in the whole quality cycle”.
This notion rests on the idea that students are experts in their own learning, and careful concertation with them is key to enhancing their learning experience.
A second example of such horizontality is through the dialogue that student representatives maintain with staff by liaising and representing student demands and concerns directly. In their post ‘Student Representatives on the value of student-staff collaboration↗️’, Callum Paterson, Academic Engagement Coordinator in the Student Voice Team at the Students’ Association, brings together the voice of student representatives from different schools across the university.
Latchiya Karthikeyan, Postgraduate Taught Programme Representative for MSc Human Resource Management in the Business School and university-wide postgraduate taught representative, says:
“As part of my role of being a Programme Representative, I have had the opportunity to constantly gather feedback from students and then work on the same by implementing changes with the help of our staff. The student development staff at the Business School have played a major role in catering to the very specific needs of our programme and it has not only resulted in increasing the satisfaction of the students by enriching their experience but has added more value to my role being the student representative”.
Thirdly, the horizontal component of student voice is illustrated through meetings like the student voice forum, which is a town hall meeting where students can address concerns and ideas directly to senior staff members.
“I left with the promise that my matter would be investigated, and I felt reassured that my concerns were being taken seriously. Others left with different action plans. The Senior Leadership team left with an idea of the actual concerns of the students” - James Blackthorne (Undergraduate student & Programme Representative, Classical Studies)
In their post, ‘Reflecting on the Student Voice forum: A dialogue between students and senior leadership↗️’, Students’ Association President 22/23, Niamh Roberts, reflects:
“I am proud that we were able to cover some of the topics that are at the forefront of students’ minds, including the cost-of-living crisis, inclusivity, and the student experience. I have always been clear that we need more of a dialogue between students and Senior Leadership, so that we can work together to solve the problems that are affecting students”
Facet 2: Diversity
A second key facet of student voice rests in recognising the diversity of voices within the student body and elaborating tools that reflect that variety of voice but also of the kind of support students need. For instance, students do not only need academic support but also pastoral access. The student panel is an effective way to include students in all forms of decision-making. This helps address not only the diversity of issues in which students are institutional stakeholders but also sheds light on the variety of perspectives on certain matters to render decisions as democratic as possible.
In her post ‘Student Voice: Using the Student Panel with Purpose’,↗️ Summer Wight, Modelling and Reporting Analyst within the Student Analytics, Insights and Modelling team, enlists various tasks the students have undertaken to harness the student voice over the last year. She asks and explains:
Furthermore, in their post, ‘Amplifying the Student Voice: The Student Feedback Network Project↗️ (SFNP)’, Boryana and Tomris, student interns with the Student Feedback Network Project, showcase their recent endeavour with SFNP that seeks to tackle challenges posed by feedback mechanisms.
Through a process of conducting focus groups with students from different backgrounds and seeking to target underrepresented students, this project aims to improve the quality of feedback mechanisms across schools at the University, to better reflect the different faces of the student body. They share the results of their survey and focus groups interviews:
“findings have differed significantly across the Schools we have engaged with. While certain schools reported to have excellent student feedback mechanisms in place, others were struggling with low response rates and the resulting minimal impact of student feedback on their learning and teaching”.
In the upcoming academic year, this project aims to produce a toolkit that can support the effective collection and implementation of student feedback in Schools across the University.
Facet 3: Belonging
This leads us to our third facet of student voice, which is about creating spaces and avenues of support that foster a sense of belonging at the University. For instance, the revised Taught Student Support Model was developed, in part, to improve students’ sense of community and foster ‘cohort activities’ as a way to enhance student belonging. The model was crafted as a direct response to a careful combing through of different student satisfaction surveys at the University to hear and listen to students’ priorities in ensuring a sense of wellbeing and belonging. As Najwa Kamaruzaman and Marianne Brown explain in their blog post ‘Listening and responding to the Student Voice: A new model for student support’↗️:
“The aim of this new way of supporting students is to enhance the experience of our students: to provide them with better and accessible support when they needed it; to ensure specialised support is provided where required; to enhance their University of Edinburgh experience; and to ensure that their academic and welfare needs are met"
Facet 4: Representation
A fourth facet of student voice is ensuring proper representation of students in the University’s official decision-making structures. While panels, surveys, and forums enable students to communicate their demands and ideas without intermediaries, the role of such mediators is key for translating, highlighting and prioritising the demands of students. This is where representation matters. This representation takes shape through two major entities.
The first is student representatives who are elected by the student body to represent cohorts in different schools. Representatives are crucial for attending committees and forums where they can report to senior staff on findings and feedback from their constituents.
As Callum Paterson explains in his post ‘Bringing Student Voice to the table: Supporting Student Representatives’↗️:
“One of the key forums where this dialogue takes place is in Student-Staff Liaison Committees (or SSLCs). These meetings take place at least once per semester and are where student representatives can present their findings and feedback to staff. This allows problems big and small to be discussed and addressed. If multiple Programmes within the School are facing the same difficulties due to a flawed policy, for example, then through SSLCs staff from across the School can be made aware and try to resolve them together.”
A second key institutional space where representatives can be influential is through the University’s Senate. This is the “University’s supreme academic body” where student representatives contribute to discussions and then vote on a wide range of important issues.
In Callum's post ‘Senate: Where does student voice fit in?’↗️, explains the role of student representation at the senate:
“While the Senate has hosted some lively and controversial discussions this year, it has given our student representatives the opportunity to make a real difference to the university, and to learn more about how the university works. From raising student concerns to holding the university and its senior leadership to account for the decisions they make, the Senate provides one of many valuable forums for students to raise their voices on the issues that matter to them, and the wider student community”.
Facet 5: Processual
When reviewing the various tools for giving space to the student voice, and the different facets of it, the bottom line is that it is an ongoing process of keeping track and staying up to date with the general ‘pulse’ of students’ needs, concerns, trends, and well-being at the University. This means keeping a constant, close, and in-tune listening of what students are saying, how they’re saying it, and responding with an open mind to these ongoing changes by continuing to innovate tools and ways of reflecting the student voice. It is a process that is in constant evolution and (re)invention.
More information and resource links to how you can involved with the 'Student Voice' can be found in the Introductory post to the Student Voice series↗️.
Collegiate Commentary
with Simon Varwell, Senior Development Consultant, Student Partnerships in Quality Scotland (sparqs)
While Teaching Matters primarily showcases University of Edinburgh teaching and learning practice, our core values of collegiality and support also extend beyond our institution, inviting a wider, international community to engage in Teaching Matters. In this feature, we ask colleagues from within and beyond to provide a short commentary on ‘Five things↗️...’, and share their own learning and teaching resource or output, which we can learn from.
Simon's Commentary on "Five facets of the Student Voice"
Student engagement, student voice and student partnership are some of the many terms that describe the ways in which students can shape their learning and wider student experience, and the task of defining them generates a multitude of perspectives and views. The five facets of student voice at The University of Edinburgh highlighted above are a great contribution, and as individual prompts or a collective framework they provide a useful basis for reflection by staff and students. Many institutions have similar approaches to interpreting their partnership activities: UHI’s Student Partnership Agreement↗️, for example, is underpinned by eight themes, and there are seven principles of student partnership at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen↗️. Scotland’s Student Engagement Framework↗️ is based on five key elements and six features that are often used as the basis for student engagement strategies.
However you cut the cake, or whatever prompts you build discussions on, what matters most is that you have, as sparqs’ student partnership staircase↗️ states, an “authentic and constructive dialogue”. That means, for example, as highlighted by Nichola and my colleague Megan in their post “Quality and the Student Voice↗️”, doing a survey is in itself merely an information-gathering exercise. What elevates that survey to being part of a dialogic partnership, however, is when students and staff work together beforehand to co-design the format and wording of the survey, and again afterwards to analyse the results, extrapolate priorities, and develop actions.
That all, of course, needs to be done in a joined up and strategised manner, and therefore the two facets offered above of horizontality and representation make for a powerful pairing. Just like sparqs’ own tool for mapping student engagement in institutional structures↗️, it is important that student reps speak not only to the staff they work most closely with but also connect the views of students they represent with the activity of senior students’ association officers.
Effective training and support for reps to do this is vital, hence sparqs’ extensive support for course rep training↗️, and one of the key points our training includes is that reps should understand the (increasing) diversity of the students that they represent and can articulate this effectively in decision-making. We are also gathering data↗️ on whether the reps themselves reflect the diversity of the students they represent.
Looking to the near future, it’s an exciting time of change for student partnership in our sector. Our Student Learning Experience model↗️, currently at the heart of our course rep training, and our partnership staircase (above) are both being redeveloped to play a key part in the tertiary quality arrangements↗️ forthcoming in 2024. These will place student-created principles of good learning and an updated model of partnership at the heart of conversations about quality, meaning student engagement will be even more to the fore than it already is in Scotland. So hang on to those five facets of the student voice, because we’ll be developing lots more thinking like that in the years to come.
About Simon: Simon Varwell is Senior Development Consultant at sparqs↗️, Scotland’s national agency for student engagement, where he leads on institutional support and staff development. He is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a graduate of the University of Winchester’s Masters in Student Engagement, and is the author of various articles and book contributions↗️ on student engagement and partnership. He can be found on Twitter↗️ and LinkedIn↗️
In case you missed it (ICYMI)
From February to May 2023, Teaching Matters featured the trending Hot Topic series - Moving forward with ChatGPT↗️, that showcased conversations and debates that this Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has stirred up in the world of university learning and teaching. Check out the most popular post from this series: ChatGPTeaching or ChatGPCheating? Arguments from a semester with large language models in class (Part 1)↗️, by Vassilis Galanos at the School of Social and Political Science.
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- Read helpful and applicable good practice examples on building assessment resilience↗️.
- Know how post-pandemic adaptation to teaching and learning can benefit academics with hidden disabilities↗️.
- Learn practical ways we can easily integrate emotional literacy for wellbeing into the curriculum↗️.
- Discover ways to develop a curious, compassionate and courageous approach to eco-anxiety↗️.
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