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
The Australian Learning and Teaching Fellows network includes Australia’s leading higher education scholars, who bring a wealth of experience in evidenced-based approaches to support student success and high-quality learning and teaching. In recognition of this expertise, they have created the ALTF Student Success blog: a forum for Fellows to share their insights and… 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
This week our blog comes from some University of Wollongong and AIME colleagues who are reflecting upon a five-year research partnership that has explored the success of this Indigenous Mentoring program at a national and international level. Warm regards, Sarah The [AIME] program … was definitely something for me that kept me there [attending… Read More
‘We must not forget that the poorest students in our society are often those studying without the emotional or financial support of their family.’ (New Starts: The challenges of HE without the support of a family network 2015, p.26) The last few weeks have flown past with travel to the UK and Ireland as well… Read More
“The workshop was great, very useful. Great layout and enjoyed opportunities for questions and discussions.” Workshop attendee While this Fellowship is looking broadly at ways to engage with the family and community of first-in-family learners, a key facet is working closely with two case study sites, namely UOW and UNSW. In both sites,… Read More
The Australian Tertiary Education Manager’s Forum ran a special session on retaining students and invited me to present. My session was exploring ways to support and retain first-in-family students with a particular emphasis on how HE mentoring programs could be designed to focus on this particular cohort. Some of the take-home messages I delivered from my… Read More
“For those of us who work in the support roles or are involved in teaching students, there is a responsibility to not only acknowledge [students’] strengths but also foreground them in how we define and also, assist student cohorts. This then is the challenge as student populations increase in number and diversity, working within… Read More