Tag: Reframing

  • Reframing the commute | Wonkhe

    Reframing the commute | Wonkhe

    Way back in 2019, the Augar review stated that students living away from home for university was part of a “deep-seated culture.”

    By extension, it inferred that living at home – in whatever home looks like for an individual – was abnormal or uncommon.

    Six years on and it really feels like this narrative is changing. Whilst I’ve written on the site before about the sector being at cross purposes when talking about the student group, the acknowledgement and discussion of commuter students and their experiences is on the increase.

    As Wonkhe’s commuter student series has demonstrated, there are many students, scholars, policy makers and practitioners doing some excellent work to highlight the challenges faced by commuter students in higher education.

    Whilst the narrative might be changing, what is less discussed is some of the benefits of commuting for students.

    In my PhD research whilst students spoke of long and difficult journeys, struggling to park on campus or counterintuitive academic timetabling, they also spoke about the positives of their experiences. It’s these that I think are an important starting point for those looking to know more about this student group.

    Challenging the narrative

    Simply put, not all students want to live in student accommodation. Some prefer to live with family. Mature students don’t necessarily want to live with younger students or uproot their family units into family accommodation options.

    For those who have been in full-time employment to starting their studies, they saw the commute as just part of a working day.

    One of the students in my study specifically told me that they didn’t expect their institution to do anything special for them as a commuter because commuting was just “what you do” in order to get to class.

    For the wider student experience, a number of students in my research participated in multiple extra-curricular activities and had numerous friends they’d met through these, as well as on their commute or on their course. One commuter even elected to get a rail replacement bus at a weekend to participate in their sports club. Anyone who has ever taken a rail replacement bus will know that this isn’t a decision taken lightly.

    In all these instances, commuter students demonstrated either the positive benefits of commuting, or that they were able to participate in university life irrespective of their commute.

    I’m not trying to say that all commuter student experiences are positive. Unless you hold an amount of luck, you’re going to be late to class at some point due to some kind of transport issue. We’ve all been there, stood waiting for a bus that doesn’t turn up or a train that’s delayed. It’s frustrating and sometimes (read, often) it makes you late to class.

    What I am saying is that this deficit narrative of commuter students often does them a bit of a disservice and ends up homogenising their experiences in a way that isn’t always that useful if we’re trying to think about how to improve their experience.

    It’s not you, it’s me

    Instead of thinking about the commuter student, we might want to consider thinking about the institution itself.

    After all, when we’re framing commuter student experiences what we’re really doing is talking about how they fit in with the institutional structures that frame their university life.

    For one of the commuters I spent time with, delays to their journey were frequent even when allowing plenty of time for their journey. What is of interest though was what happened next.

    One of their class tutors routinely employed the institutions’ academic attendance policy. The policy stated that if a student arrived later than 15 minutes after the class had started, they’d be marked as absent. This meant that a couple of times, whilst they’d informed this staff member via email in advance that they’d be late and did physically make it to their class, they were still marked absent because they arrived 15 minutes late.

    In contrast another tutor, acknowledging that this student had emailed them warning of their late attendance, allowed them to sign the register when they arrived.

    Institutions can have one attendance policy but have staff enact it in different ways. If you’re a commuter student who’s had an awful journey to get to class, it’s not ideal when you’re not sure how your class tutor might respond.

    This particular student had been previously recommended by their tutor that they should factor more time into their journey to arrive on time. This student, along with many others in my study, were already factoring in extra time in their journeys.

    You can also see why there might be some disgruntlement between students here. If you’ve done the same journey as someone else on your course who has a different module tutor, you’d be annoyed to find out that they let them sign the register yet your tutor marked you as absent. Experiences like these then can lead to differing expectations between students and the institution which could develop into some pretty bad feeling.

    Great expectations

    I suggest it’s a question here around what the institution deems a reasonable expectation of its students, and by extension whether or not the institutional structures are suitably flexible enough to accommodate any fluctuations within these.

    If the above example here is anything to go by, it’s likely that what’s considered as a reasonable expectation of commuter students will differ between students, institutional policies and ultimately the staff that enact them.

    Where students spoke to me about commuting to university in more positive terms, it was often relating to how their expectations of university had matched their reality. This could be down to the individual themselves. For example, where students had researched their commute or done a commute to work prior to starting their degree they took things like disruptions to travel as simply part of life as a commuter student.

    But if the expectations that were being asked of students had changed. For example, being taught by different academic staff with different stances on attendance, or these experiences were not clear between the institution and the student to begin with, this negative narrative could often arise as a result.

    Being a commuter student is not mutually exclusive to having a poor student experience. But if we want to hear more about the positive experiences of commuter students, we need to think about why they’re positive and consider how our institutions can enhance these experiences further.

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  • Re-framing the Arts and Humanities   

    Re-framing the Arts and Humanities   

    • This blog was kindly authored by Annamaria Carusi, Director at Interchange Research. Annamaria recently joined a HEPI/Taylor & Francis roundtable to discuss advancing translational research.

    HEPI, together with Taylor & Francis, recently highlighted translational research’s importance in bridging scientific discovery and real-world applications. This is a much-needed part of higher education strategy, especially given Labour’s framing of its policies in terms of missions. If the government is inspired by Mariana Mazzucato’s conception of missions, it needs policies that will ensure the country fully benefits from the substantial investment made by the State into research and development.  Finding better connections between knowledge production and application is a key way of doing this.

    Often, the focus of attention in translational efforts is bounded within STEM subjects, with the idea of translation originating in the biomedical sciences, with the ‘bench to bedside’ approach. But the creative industries are just as central to the economic well-being of the country – and its people. This is recognised in the establishment of the government’s Creative Industries Taskforce, which had its first meeting in December 2024.

    The Arts and Humanities make a substantial a contribution to the UK’s economy: a House of Lords report gives the figure of £126bn as the creative industries contribution to GVA in 2022, which compares favourably to the contribution of STEM subjects. The UK is recognised as a global leader in art and culture. This is despite disciplines feeding into the creative industries being consistently de-prioritised in government policy since 2009, with decreasing levels of funding. Universities are struggling with their own budgetary constraints, and Arts, Humanities, and creative courses have borne the brunt of redundancies and closures.

    Addressing the tension between the potential of the arts and humanities and the financial pressures they are under is a priority for any policy to build bridges between higher education and real-world impacts.  Pre-conceptions about different disciplines’ relation to real-world impacts feed these tensions. Here, I suggest three areas where shifting pre-conceptions would be helpful for better positioning of arts and humanities with respect to real-world impacts.

    Firstly, we need to have multiple different ways of thinking about translational research, and not fall back on science and technology as the paradigmatic example of this. We need to recognise that there are different patterns of interactions among research and other outputs, skills, practices, processes, communities and society. They cannot all be shoe-horned into one model (in fact, the translation model does not work very well even for the biomedical sciences where it originated). Co-creation is a term often adopted in creative contexts; a better understanding of how it works will unlock more potential social benefit, especially for the arts and humanities, and possibly for other disciplines too.

    Secondly, pitting  Arts and Humanities and STEM against each other is not only counterproductive, but also creates an obstacle to further benefits of the arts and humanities, beyond those we already see through the creative industries. The need for models of research where different disciplines complement each other is even greater in the mission framework that the Labour government has adopted for its policy.

    Missions are not just an ambitious sounding word; they require breaking apart the silos into which research is currently organised and integrating thinking and doing across many different skills and forms of knowledge and expertise.  Policy interventions targeted at facilitating and encouraging cross-disciplinary collaborations across STEM and Arts and Humanities will allow researchers to develop flexibility, agility, creativity, and that most invaluable of research skills, the ability to look at problems from different perspectives, and in so doing, will also allow different models for constructing these bridges to emerge.

    Crucial for getting the best out of these collaborations – not just for the first goal of research, the peer-reviewed publication, but for those all-important social impacts –  is that all disciplines involved should be viewed as equal partners. An anecdote from one of my (many) personal experiences of collaborating as a humanities scholar with scientists shows why: I was invited to be an Arts and Humanities representative in a synthetic biology network, a cross-disciplinary collaboration that, at the time, was required by funders. When I asked what that might entail, I was told: ‘Anything, so long as you don’t put obstacles in the way of our research.’  But maybe disruption sometimes is a useful part of research and innovation? Further, there was nothing in the funding structure of the network that equalised the collaboration or tried to work towards a genuine integration; ultimately all the partners were in a loose network and mostly everyone researched and published in their own pre-set disciplinary journals.

    When collaborating across these domains, we must understand that the arts are not secondary vehicles for science and technology. They are not merely communicators of scientific ideas already worked out by the scientists; the humanities are not there only to bring their particular brand of empathy or analytical and critical thinking skills, but also for the substantive content and ideas they bring. As equal partners addressing complex societal challenges together, the outputs and innovations that make their way into society are more likely to be implementable, with fewer unthought-through consequences for society. Additionally, the recognised and incentivised outputs of a collaboration should be broad enough to accommodate research publications, data sets, and products (such as a drug, a device, a policy, or a piece of software) but also the very wide array of direct and indirect outputs of the creative sector. 

    Thirdly, we need to tackle perceptions about employability, beginning with those of students as they make their course and degree choices. The lower numbers of students choosing arts and humanities courses at university goes hand in hand with the lower numbers choosing these subjects for AS and A-levels.  In the case of English A-levels, one of the contributing factors is that there is a clearer career pathway for STEM subjects. This is despite the fact that Arts and Humanities are no slouches regarding employment. In 2022, 620 000 workers were employed in the arts sector and a further 350 000 were self-employed.  It is often proposed that couching the Arts and Humanities in terms of their employment or economic impacts diminishes their intrinsic value. The intrinsic/extrinsic binary is not helpful, especially when it serves to fuel the perceived differences between arts and humanities, and science and technology. All of these disciplines have intrinsic values: as a researcher who has followed scientists around their labs, I have seen first-hand that often what holds them there is their passion for their subject for its own sake.

    The more Arts and Humanities are seen as only one side of a binary between ‘intrinsic’ versus ‘extrinsic’ values, the more they become the precinct of an elite class, who go on to shape the arts sector in their image. Instead, what is needed is a concerted effort to change these perceptions and to show students that they can have both intrinsic and extrinsic values. Whichever model is used for bridging across higher education and real-world impact for the arts and humanities, be it translation or co-creation, should capture the complex relations between these two forms of value. The right forms of career support need to be co-designed with the whole sector and highlighted for prospective students.  As we form strategies to realise more fully the direct and indirect benefits of arts and humanities, the economic survival of those practising them cannot be placed on a lower rung than those practising other disciplines.

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