TLC Working One to One: Authentically Student-Centred Learning Development

1. TLCWorking One to One: Authentically Student-Centred Learning Development Dr Helen Webster Newcastle University UK @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities

2. Who Are We? • Who am I? “Learning Developer” • Who are you? • Common aim: how to have one to one conversations with students about their learning, to help them succeed.

3. How do we envisage these conversations? What’s the slogan on your T-Shirt?

4. Shared Values Collaborative Emancipatory Aspirational Social justice Person-centred Inclusive Reflective Non-judgemental Non-directive Empowering Holistic Student-led Situated

5. Study Skills Conversations • Avoid abbreviations and contractions. Write words out in full: • ‘dept.’ as ‘department’ • ‘e.g’. as ‘for example’ • ‘didn’t’ as ‘did not’ • ‘they’re’ as ‘they are’ • ‘isn’t’ as ‘is not’ • Avoid personal pronouns such as ‘I’/’we’ and ‘you’. Instead, sentences begin in impersonal ways such as ‘it can be seen that…’ • Linking ideas together: • Introducing an alternative viewpoint: conversely; in comparison; on the contrary; in fact; though; although. (Cottrell, Study Skills Handbook)

6. The ‘Study Skills’ Model ‘The study skills model sees writing and literacy as primarily an individual and cognitive skill. This approach focusses on the surface features of language form and presumes that students can transfer their knowledge of writing and literacy unproblematically from one context to another’. (Lea and Street, 2006). • Study Skills: [Remediation of] Student Deficit. • ‘Fix it’, atomised [transferable] skills; surface language, grammar, spelling. • Sources: behavioural and experimental psychology; programmed learning • Student writing as technical and instrumental skill (Robinson-Pant and Street, 2012).

7. Academic Socialisation Conversations Academic writing is clear, concise, focussed, structured and backed up by evidence. Its purpose is to aid the reader’s understanding. Characteristics of academic writing. Academic writing is: • Planned and focused: answers the question and demonstrates an understanding of the subject. • Structured: is coherent, written in a logical order, and brings together related points and material. • Evidenced: demonstrates knowledge of the subject area, supports opinions and arguments with evidence, and is referenced accurately. • Formal in tone and style: uses appropriate language and tenses, and is clear, concise and balanced Leeds University https://library.leeds.ac.uk/info/14011/writing/106/academic_writing

8. The Academic Socialisation Model • Academic socialization is concerned with students’ acculturation into disciplinary and subject-based discourses and genres. Students acquire the ways of talking, writing, thinking and using literacy that typified members of a disciplinary or subject area community. The academic socialization model presumes that disciplinary discourses are relatively stable and, once students have learned and understood the ground rules of a particular academic discourse, they are able to reproduce it unproblematically. (Lea and Street, 2006). • Academic socialisation: acculturation of students into academic discourse • Inducting students into new ‘culture’; focus on orientation to learning and interpretation of learning task, e.g. ‘deep’, ‘surface’, ‘strategic’ learning; homogeneous ‘culture’, lack of focus on institutional practices, change and power. • Sources: social psychology, anthropology, constructivism. • Student writing as transparent medium of representation. (Robinson-Pant and Street, 2012).

9. What’s really going on: A contradiction? “The Learning Developer’s role is to respond to this [student] expectation by identifying issues, offering suggestions or solutions whilst at the same time encouraging autonomy” (Caldwell et al, 2018).

10. Translate: Learning Developer: • “It might be better if you…” • “Do you think it might be worth trying…?” • “I’m not sure about…” • “I wonder if…” • “What do you think…?” Learning Developer: • “This would be better.” • “You should do this.” • “This is wrong.” • “I think this.” • “Agree with me.”

11. What’s really going on: A lack of congruence? “so maybe you, it might be better if you put it at the beginning”. This is a conventionally indirect suggestion, using a mitigator (maybe) and conditional (might) so that the LD appears not to be telling the student directly what to do, but instead makes a hypothetical suggestion. Furthermore, the LD changes the pronoun ‘you’ to ‘it’ to give the impression that the LD has no personal claim in the solution and so that the student can eventually ‘own’ it. (Caldwell et al, 2018, highlighting mine)

12. What’s really going on: A dilemma? “To pretend that there is not a hierarchical relationship between tutor and student is a fallacy, and to engineer peer tutoring techniques that divest the tutor of power and authority is at times foolish and can even be unethical”. (Carino, 2003). So should we be oppressive or disingenuous?

13. What we’re left with • Identify • Hm, let’s have a look at your essay… • Explain • Ah, I see the issue, look… • Advise • What you need to do is… • Examine • Diagnose • Prescribe

14. Disempowering the student “The tutorial is therefore guided by the LD and the student adheres by providing continuers, agreements and minimal responses. Challenge is rare, yet accounts are often provided after LD evaluation to defend, save face or explain” (Caldwell, 2018).

15. The Academic Literacies Model • Academic literacies is concerned with meaning-making, identity, power and authority, and foregrounds the institutional nature of what counts as knowledge in any particular academic context. It […] views the processes involved in acquiring appropriate and effective uses of literacy as more complex, dynamic, nuanced, situated and involving both epistemological issues and social processes, including power relations among people, institutions and social identities. (Lea and Street, 2006). • Academic Literacies: Students’ negotiation of conflicting literary practices • Literacies as social practices; at level of epistemologies and identities; institutions as sites of/constituted in discourses and power; variety of communicative repertoire, switching with regard to linguistic practices, social meanings and identities, • Sources: New Literacy studies; critical discourse analysis, systemic functional linguistics, cultural anthropology. • Student Writing as constitutive and contested. (Robinson-Pant and Street, 2012).

16. What would that conversation look like? One that acknowledges: • The place of identity and social context • The multiplicity of perspectives and discourses • Meaning-making and its contested nature • The role of power and authority • The need for negotiation

17. Why look to Clinical Psychology? “At some level, it all makes sense” (Butler, 1998) “As no one else can know how we perceive, we are the best experts on ourselves” (Gross, 1992) “The single most damaging effect of psychiatric diagnosis is loss of meaning as people’s problems are divested of their personal and social situatedness and labelled as ‘illness’.” (Johnstone, 2017).

18. What is Formulation? A core skill, although ‘there is no universally agreed definition of formulation’  (DCP 2011) • ‘The tool […] the lynchpin that holds theory and practice together’ (Butler, 1998) • ‘A crucible’ (Dudley and Kuyken, 2013) • ‘A shared narrative or story’ (DCP, 2011) • ‘constructed rather than discovered’ (Harper and Spellman 2006) • “The process of co-constructing a hypothesis” (Johnstone, 2017) • “A process of ongoing collaborative sense-making” (Harper and Moss, 2003)

19. Characteristics of formulation: Person- not Problem-centred All formulations: • summarise the service user’s core problems; • suggest how the service user’s difficulties may relate to one another, by drawing on psychologicaltheories and principles; • aim to explain, on the basis of psychological theory, the development and maintenanceof the service user’s difficulties, at this time and in these situations; • indicate a plan of intervention which is based in the psychological processes and principles already identified; • are open to revision and re-formulation. (Johnstone and Dallos, 2006)

20. Rethinking Authority “The clinician brings knowledge derived from theory, research and clinical experience, while the service user brings expertise about their own life and the meaning and impact of their relationships and circumstances” (Johnstone, 2017) 2

21. Whose learning?

22. Opening up our role Student Agency Tutor Knowledge Student Knowledge Tutor Agency

23. The Five Ps of LD Perception of task Pertinent factors Presenting “Problem” Product Process

24. The Five Ps of LD Perception of task Pertinent factors Presenting “Problem” Product Process

25. Formulation in identifying the issue Do you hear voices that no one else can hear? “Yes.”

26. Formulation and co-constructing meaning • I have really good hearing • I talk to myself in my head • My flat’s walls are really thin • I live with my grandmother who’s deaf. • I pray. I find it comforting. • I listen to podcasts on headphones a lot • It’s ok, I can hear that too, it’s not just you • Sorry, I thought you were being metaphorical! No, not literally.

27. Formulation in identifying the issue “I’m not very good at writing” • What does the problem mean to the student? • Whose problem is it? • Is it a problem? Is it THE problem?

28. The Five Ps of LD Perception of task Pertinent factors Presenting “Problem” Product Process

30. The Five Ps of LD Perception of task Pertinent factors Presenting “Problem” Product Process

31. Maybe we could learn a thing or two… “In these [study skills] approaches, the distance between tutors’ expectations and student-writers’ understanding of such expectations is problematized as a mismatch which can be resolved if tutors state clearly to student-writers, in written or spoken words, what is required” (Lillis, 2001) “The rat is always right’ (B. F. Skinner, cited in Lindsley, 1990) Discuss…..

32. The Five Ps of LD Perception of task Pertinent factors Presenting “Problem” Product Process

33. The Writing Process (Coffin, 2002)

34. The Five Ps of LD Perception of task Pertinent factors Presenting “Problem” Product Process

35. Problematisingwriting Learning “out come” “this [conduit] metaphor signals the following common sense notions about language: […] that language is a transparent medium, reflecting rather than constructing meanings” (Lillis, 2001)

36. Strategies: constructing authorial identity ‘Heuristic’ adapted from Lillis, 2001

37. Formulation techniques • Contracting and re-contracting –explaining your role regarding them • Congruent: genuinely open questions and non-directive language • Consensual: explaining why you’re asking or proposing and what you hope it will achieve • Juxtaposition: bringing elements together so the student can negotiate meaning and resolution in the interstices • Two of the 5 Ps, Past and Present, two Perspectives, two Contexts • Inviting the student’s comment, challenge, questions, conclusions, reflections, choices, interpretations, rejections, solutions, etc.

38. Formulation techniques

39. The difference between Diagnosis and Formulation in Learning Development

40. Suggestions for Practice LD Formulation… • may not always be appropriate or necessary • develops learning in its own right – it is an ‘intervention’ • could be used alongside other LD activities e.g. coaching, teaching, advising (care should be taken in contracting) • is an iterative, ongoing process open to revision • is non-linear • could be light-touch or in-depth • could be used to underpin other LD activities e.g. workshop design • is a rich source of CPD for the Learning Developer

41. Differences with Clinical Psychology

42. Contact: Dr Helen Webster • Head of the Writing Development Centre, Newcastle University • Email: helen.webster@ncl.ac.uk • Twitter: @scholastic_rat • Blog: https://rattusscholasticus.wordpress.com/