The next stop on this whirlwind tour was the University of South Carolina (USC) and specifically the National Resource Center for FYE and Students in Transition. The Center is somewhere that I have wanted to visit for a number of years but I did not expect the extreme care and attention that was paid to my visit;… Read More
The Fellowship also explored Canadian and US approaches to retaining first-in-family students – in Canada this included visits to both Western University and also, University of Toronto. The latter is a large urban institution with over 90,000 students spread over three campuses within the city, the largest cohort is domestic undergraduate students but there is a… Read More
The University of Brighton is the home for the Centre for Higher Education Equity Research (CHEER), whose objective is to research the ‘systems, structures, cultures, experiences and consequences of inequities within higher education’. I was able to chat with Dr Emily Danvers, Dr Tamsin Hinton-Smith and also, Professor Louise Morley (Head of CHEER) to reflect upon their… Read More
York St John University is located in the walled town of York, which has a border of high walls dating back to Roman times – apparently York has more miles of intact wall than any other city in England. This coupled with winding streets (one of which Shambles was the model for Diagon Street in Harry… Read More
Over the two days of this visit I also discussed the new project that MMU has introduced for First in Family students called The FirstGen Scheme. This is a flagship project that has only commenced in the last two years and adopts a whole of student life cycle approach to supporting FiF students beginning at the… Read More
The Churchill Fellowship began with a visit to Manchester – a city of great tradition and growth having a city scape dotted with building sites and development – not surprisingly Manchester has one of the largest number of cranes (n=64) within a city centre. My two day visit was with Prof Claire Hamshire and colleagues in order to discuss… Read More
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to conduct research with Year 11 students who are from rural/remote locations in NSW. Over two days, colleagues and myself worked with the students to create digital stories about how they ‘imagine’ or consider their life after school. We also invited the young people to participate in… Read More
This week’s blog comes from Dr Janine Delahunty and reflects upon the notion of intersectionality and how this plays out in students’ lives. Drawing on the data collected from the current Discovery Project on First in Family persistence behaviours, Janine provides a snapshot of both the resilience and cultural strengths that our diverse student cohort… Read More
That’s probably a conditioning from a working-class family that didn’t see university as an option. Honestly, when you sat down as a child and you said, “I want to be an astronaut” – that was not something that… that’s great when you’re five but by the time you’re 13, 14, living in a country town,… Read More
At many institutions, these weeks mark the beginning of university for a new cohort of first year students. Orientation Week (or O Week) is when we invite our commencing students onto campus, generally bombard them with lots of information, perhaps even feed them and generally squeeze as much exposure to the institution as is possible… Read More