RAISE Network Conference 2024

 By Tim Herrick, Chiara Bruno, Helen Herold and Sara Pearman

In the middle of September, the four of us travelled to Leicester to attend the annual conference of the RAISE Network

RAISE is an international network focused on, to spell out the acronym, Researching, Advancing, and Inspiring Student Engagement, and is a great space for colleagues looking to work in more dynamic ways with students, including co-creation and student-staff partnerships.  They’ve run conferences since 2011, and it’s always been a nice event - our experiences have been of it as a supportive environment, welcoming to those who haven’t been before, and full of people doing interesting things.

The range of papers was impressive - from collaborative drawing to decolonising the curriculum to considering how Students’ Union officers feel they represent their student body.  This blog post can’t do more than pull out some themes that appeared to cut across different sessions, and which might offer some insights for colleagues here who are seeking to expand their ways of working with students.

• Release the potential of students, by allowing them to work on issues that matter strongly to them

This came through really powerfully in one of the keynote sessions, from students closely involved in MedRACE, a student/staff group at Leicester Medical School, working to progress the British Medical Association Charter for medical schools to prevent and address racial harassment.  Creating conditions for a better experience for medical students from Black, Asian, and other minority ethnic backgrounds was obviously a priority not just for these students but for the profession as a whole, and the energy and commitment of the students were palpable.  While the goals were ambitious, the steps students were taking to pursue them were firmly grounded in everyday experience - for example creating medical headwear that was more inclusive, such as scrubs that sit over a hijab, or have ample room for larger hair.  The combination here of student drive and staff support had been really effective at enabling change at local and regional levels, as well as providing inspiration to other groups working on allied causes; and especially during Black History Month, it seems appropriate to celebrate ways of making practice more inclusive.

• Don’t be afraid to start small, and iterate projects over time

Across a few presentations, there was a narrative of beginning activities in one area or for one purpose, sometimes with fixed-term funding; seeing the success of that grow, so there is more institutional support and mainstreaming of the activity; then varying it further to adapt to new circumstances, such as the rise in hybrid learning prompted by the Covid pandemic.  

A nice example was a project about inclusive Engineering education at the University of Cambridge, which began by looking specifically at gender in Engineering as part of an Athena SWAN application.  The project, however, developed beyond that to offer a wider reflection on how Engineering was being experienced by a whole range of students, and how these experiences might intersect with students’ attainment and graduate destinations.  Working with students as partners throughout this process allowed staff to remain focused on shared priorities, and take actions that had genuine impact on students’ experiences.  It’s probably better to try something and learn from that experience than it is to stay still.

• Be smart with student engagement

Think about what other factors might be influencing student behaviour and attendance in curricular and co-curricular activities - obvious points like balancing the need for part-time employment with study, but maybe also less obvious ones about how their timetable looks at any given point - if they are only required on campus for 50 minutes and it’s a 40 minute round trip, is this likely to diminish their motivation?  The data from ongoing research by Tom Lowe and colleagues suggests that practical sessions, or those that move beyond “chalk and talk”, are the ones students get the greatest value from.  So how does interaction feature in our programmes, and what might we need to change for it to be more visible?

• Keep pushing for student partnership activities to be inclusive

Following some suggestions from papers, good practice would be to invite students to submit expressions of interest to a role through a variety of media, not just written CVs and cover letters - someone might feel more comfortable creating a short video, for example.  There was also the helpful guidance to focus on what might students do, rather than what have they done, thereby seeking to reduce the influence that forms of "cultural capital" might have on the recruitment process.  

Finally, in a project based at Sheffield Hallam, they used a "listening rooms" method as the first phase of data generation, inviting students to hold a recorded discussion with a friend about a topic that was potentially quite sensitive to discuss with staff.  While actions coming from that method were taken forward by students and staff, the fact that the first step was relatively private had a strongly positive impact on the success of the project overall.

 

All of us are happy to discuss our experiences more broadly with colleagues, including sharing any contacts or slides for further details.  We also hope to start putting into practice some of the insights reported here, with the aspiration to make student engagement activities more rewarding, inclusive, and impactful.

Chiara Bruno is an Academic Development Advisor in Education Development Services

Tim Herrick Helen Herold and Sara Pearman all work in the Faculty of Social Science