Welcome to LITE Bites, an occasional podcast from Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence
at the University of Leeds.
Episodes will be hosted by members of the LITE team.
And we'll be showcasing the scholarship of teaching and learning from across the university.
Hello and welcome.
I'm Emma Peasland.
I'm a research and impact officer here at LITE at the University of Leeds.
And I'm here having a conversation today with Michelle Schneider, who is learning advisor
in the learning development team here at Leeds.
How are you doing, Michelle?
Yeah, I'm great.
Thank you.
Enjoying the sunshine?
Marvelous.
So you're going to share with us a little bit today about your LITE fellowship that
you completed early this year.
And so I wonder if you just want to start by telling us a bit about the research that
you did and what it was that you wanted to investigate.
So I'm going to try not to waffle on too much here and keep it as succinct as possible.
I will just start by giving a little bit of context as to what I do and why I decided
to research what I did in the end.
So the learning development team, basically, we work with academics and direct with students
to help students develop their academic skills and literacies.
So we do this basically in two ways.
So we work with academics to embed academic skills and literacies in the curriculum and
directly linked to the discipline.
But we also offer the skills at library co-curricular service as well.
So the idea of that is students can reflect on their own needs and seek out their own
opportunities to develop the skills that they want or seek extra help or different perspective,
or maybe they're just looking for sort of quote unquote neutral space to discuss their
work.
That's the idea.
So we see the skills at library as being quite co-curricular.
But what the literature mainly says is that embedded is like the sort of goal standard.
That's what we should be doing.
And centralized support is often very much critiqued as being the kind of remedial deficit
model.
I can understand why that critique happens because I think at many universities that
centralized service is seen as seen as being the main way that students, if they need anything
to do with academic skills, they just go to the central service and it ends up really
divorced from their discipline and what they're doing.
But at Leeds, we see ourselves, as I say, very much as this co-curricular.
And so what I was interested in though is whether staff and students here at Leeds,
how they perceive the skills at library service.
Like is it seen as this just place where if you're struggling or failing or not meeting
the expectations that you think other students are meeting, whether the skills at library
service, that's what it's there for.
But I think more importantly from my perspective is that I worry that not only do staff and
students see the service in that way, but maybe staff see students or students see themselves
in that way as somehow being deficit and in need of like this kind of remedial help.
And I wanted to know whether we perpetuate that idea in students, whether students see
that.
And I think the student voice is very much missing from the literature in terms of the
centralised service as well.
Like no one seems to be asking the students, well, what do you think?
Why do you use it?
So that's really what I wanted to kind of look at, mainly, I guess, the student voice,
but also compare it to staff as well.
Fascinating.
So can you talk a little bit about how you did that?
Yes.
So I mean, I very quickly realised that it was very difficult to measure perception in
this way, especially without saying directly, like, do you think Skills at Library takes
a deficit approach?
I didn't want to lead it in that way because students may never or staff may never use
those terms.
So what I did is I took a mixed method approach, quite standard one of a survey and focus groups.
So one of the things that I did with the survey for the students is I used a validated educational
self-efficacy scale.
I wanted to ascertain whether students' confidence in their own abilities was linked to how they
view or how they use the service.
And within the survey, I then used quite open questions to try to ascertain, like, why students
think that they would use different parts of the service, so workshops, one-to-ones,
web pages.
And then kind of try and take a bit of a thematic analysis of the language they use, especially.
That was, like, probably one of the key bits of the survey.
And I did something quite similar with staff, so I sort of mirrored the survey as much as
possible, asking them, why do you think students might utilise the service?
And then with students, I also ran some focus groups to try to delve a bit deeper into how
they perceive Skills at Library.
But I guess the focus groups was a little bit more trying to ascertain how the students
saw themselves, so to really get a sense of whether they see some deficit in themselves,
which is what I was hoping that they wouldn't.
And that's really what you want to avoid with students, I would say.
Cool.
So what were your key findings then?
What did you find out from this?
So one of the key things that I think was really interesting was that there was no significant
correlation between students' self-efficacy and their use or perception of the service.
And so the students that answered the survey, their self-efficacy kind of ranged from high,
low, but a lot in the middle.
And there wasn't really any kind of relationship between that and the kind of wording that
they used in the survey, and I thought that was quite interesting.
And kind of linked with that, I thought from the focus groups, it really came out that
most of the students, there was really an agreement that in terms of coming to university,
they felt that the expectation on their academic skills needed for a degree should be quite
minimum coming in.
They felt that either that their schooling had only prepared them a certain amount.
There was words like we were taught to regurgitate, not necessarily to analyse, to think critically,
and that kind of thing.
So students felt that actually coming in, they should be expected to be at a fairly
minimum level, really.
It wasn't as clear, because I didn't do focus groups with staff, which we talk about soon,
may have been an error.
But some of the words that the staff used in the survey suggested that they have higher
expectations of what students should come in with, maybe not do come in with, but what
they should come in with.
So that was a bit of a difference, and I thought that was really interesting.
The other thing that I think came out with the analysis of the language that's used
is I think staff and student perceptions of the skills at library service were quite varied.
So both kind of suggested that students would come for all different reasons.
So that they wanted to enhance something or improve something, or maybe that they were
struggling or maybe they just wanted to take all the opportunities available to them.
But in general, what we saw students use was language that seemed more positive, like develop,
enhance, improve, whereas the staff, often the terminology was slightly more negative.
So use words like failing, desperate, struggling.
So this suggests a kind of maybe a slightly different perception of students and what
it means to need to develop academic skills and that maybe staff has seen students in
a particular way of having some kind of deficit rather than, oh, students coming in and we
need to develop them from where they're starting because this is a, you know, they're starting
a degree and why would they have all of those skills that you need to be successful?
Students are expecting to come in and develop their skills through their programme.
So I guess that really shows or highlights that potentially that lack of student voice
in the literature that you mentioned earlier and the fact the literature leans towards
that deficit model.
Yeah.
And I think that it's, I think the way that we see students may encourage us to take a
deficit, sort of a medial kind of approach.
Like if you see that when students are coming in, if you think, oh, they're not at the
expected level, so we need to send them to this service to get to the expected level,
which isn't really the approach that we want to take and isn't effective, the most effective
approach.
Really, you know, skills development needs to be developed within the curriculum.
And actually when we ask the students, like, whose responsibility is it to develop these
skills that you've suggested that you need to be successful in your degree, they say
it needs to be the university and in particular their programme, a school that needs to take
responsibility for that development.
A lot of them said they wanted that in collaboration with our team in the library.
They saw us as having those students who had experienced our service said that they recognised
the kind of expertise in that kind of area.
But they saw that collaboration as being important, but that ultimately what they wanted was their
schools to be the primary and that they wanted also a co-curricular offer that they could
make a decision to use.
And they gave a lot of different reasons as to why they might want to use the service.
So they said for extra help or a different perspective or for something that maybe wouldn't
naturally be in their discipline necessarily, like managing their workload or whatever it
might be.
So that was another interesting finding.
The students were very much saw it like we hope that skills at library is a co-curricular
and I think that's what the students want, but it doesn't necessarily mean they see
it like that now.
I think they worry that it's perceived to be the primary way that they're supposed
to get academic skills and matrices.
But they'd maybe like a little bit more embedded content if possible.
Yeah, so they were definitely like they want it in their schools.
Interesting.
And you hinted at perhaps one thing before, but is there anything you would have done
differently if you were going to start again?
Yeah, so this is a really hard one because I think that anyone doing research would probably
say I wish I'd done this differently or I wish I'd maybe taken the question in a slightly
different way.
I think the main thing was I think if it had more time, I would have maybe interviewed
staff in more detail.
I mean, there's some interesting literature already that it interviewed staff at other
universities, but actually on reflection, I wish I had a bit more of that staff input.
So with the survey, there was like 189 students and only 22 staff.
Obviously, we do have a lot more students and staff, but I do now regret a bit not interviewing
some staff as well, kind of posing some of the questions that students raised with staff
possibly.
Maybe that's an interesting follow-up project for the future.
Yeah, that could definitely be something interesting.
And then I think when I got to the end of my research, I definitely thought, oh, this
could have been an interesting way to go actually.
But then I guess that's what a lot of people, that's probably the interesting thing about
research.
So it's not necessarily I wish I'd done it differently because I probably wouldn't have
ever got to that thinking.
Because one of the areas I'm really interested in is how it impacts that sense of belonging.
So if we have certain expectations on student skills and we're not just kind of taking students
as they are and building on where they are, we're thinking, oh, you need to have this,
this, and this to be a lead student.
I wonder how that impacts on the sense of belonging.
Do students think, oh, I don't have this that other students seem to have?
Are we immediately putting them in a deficit?
Is there something wrong with them?
And then I wonder how they feel.
Do they feel that then they don't really belong here?
Or they reach this certain expectation?
I don't know.
Wow.
But I mean, you've got lots of really interesting findings out of that.
So what's what's what how are those being used now?
Are you implementing them in your practice or yeah, what were your kind of implications
for the future or recommendations that came out?
So I guess there's two ways that we're looking at it.
So one from our team perspective and then I guess at the kind of broader university
level.
So I think from from our team and what I'm really interested to do is work more in partnership
with students to kind of review the skills that library co-curricular offer and ensure
that we're not perpetuating that deficit approach.
I think we've done quite a lot of work, particularly on things like redeveloping our workshops
and how we run them to make sure that we are really student centred and the student have
a lot of say in how the workshop runs for them.
So it's not this kind of like, here is what you must know and we're the experts and we
will feed you all this information.
It's very much them taking control of their own learning and trying to empower the student.
But I still wonder whether actually this service maybe does perpetuate it in some ways and
I'd like to work with students to look at that and I guess then to really try and think
of some novel approaches to improve how we communicate the role of skills at library
to staff and to students so that it's very clear that this is complementary but not a
replacement for embedded academic skills and literacy.
So I think that's kind of how our team are going to look at it.
And then from the university perspective, I think and this isn't all staff but I wonder
whether there needs to be in some areas a kind of change of perceptions of how we see
students so rather than when they come in we see them as being somehow in deficit but
rather when students come into the university with lots of different experiences and backgrounds
that we like amplify and build on their existing skills.
So the student feels valued and what they're coming in with feels valued rather than what
they maybe have, well, perceived to have not got.
Yet.
Yet, exactly.
And I guess the other thing is really looking at the language we use so rather than kind
of this, I don't know if it's officially called a deficit terminology but rather than
talking about students having a lack of or issues with or an inability to, we can talk
about much more developmental positive language like how we're going to build on or enhance
or develop which seems like a bit more of, yeah, like students coming here to develop
things rather than because there's something missing in them.
Brilliant.
Well, it sounds like you've got loads of interesting findings and lots of routes forward to implement
those findings and also maybe a route for another project in the future.
That would be great.
Yeah.
That's fascinating.
So thank you very much for taking time today to join me for this conversation.
And yeah, we'll hopefully we'll look forward to seeing how this research develops.