Facilitating not gatekeeping

The UNE project transforming the student experience

When Associate Professor Ingrid Harrington, an inclusive education expert with UNE's School of Education, stepped back into teaching first-year units in 2018, she realised many units were placing too high an expectation on students, and something had to change.

"Inclusive education in the teaching system is about understanding the student and putting them first. But when I stepped back into teaching first year university subjects after having taught third and fourth years, I found we were not practising what we preached," she says.

"We have many students coming from diverse backgrounds, often with no prior tertiary experience in their family, but our unit outlines and assessments were using advanced academic language and setting performance expectations at a third and fourth year level.

"Our units were also overwhelming first-year students with things like competing assessment deadlines," Ingrid says.

With the support of the Head of School of UNE's School of Education, Professor Sue Gregory, Ingrid began what would become the Commencing Student Success Program (CSSP), with a review of the literature.

"There's a really well-established body of literature on the first-year experience, that clearly tells us what works and what doesn't," Ingrid says.

Ingrid was able to distil the research findings into 14 evidence-based elements (which she called 'basic elements'), that could be embedded in UNE's School of Education units to improve the student experience. A team of experts from the School of Education has helped bring the project together over and implement it across the School of Education over four years.

"We tend to get stuck in a gatekeeping mentality at university - keeping rigidly to what students can and can't do, without taking into account their experience and life situation, for example where they're up to academically, and the commitments they're trying to work around.

"We needed to get back to what the literature talks about - and that's less gatekeeping, and more facilitation. That means describing and showing students what they're aiming for in an assessment, rather than just marking them at the end," Ingrid says.

The elements recommended in the project include improving clarity in assessment task expectations, improved flexibility and more interactive and visual elements.

The project team members have been available throughout the project to help unit coordinators understand the project's teaching and learning recommendations and to embed the 'basic elements' in their units for a better student experience. All School of Education units now contain at least some of the elements.

The team has collected data regularly across the lifespan of the project with approximately 1800 student responses between 2021-2024. Students consistently report that the interactive 'basic elements' are supportive and useful for their trimester learning, resulting in an increase in unit retention. Across the four years, 93 per cent of students voted to keep the 'basic elements' in UNE Education unit design brought about by the CSSP project.

Since its inception, the CSSP has been highly awarded at school, faculty, university, state and regional levels, and has now entered the national award arena. Ingrid has been invited to speak about the project at numerous universities here and internationally, because of its track record of reducing attrition and increasing student engagement.

It helped inform a later UNE-wide project, Project Uplift, which has 16 'basic elements', enabling all UNE students to benefit from the research-based improved learning experience.

Read more here: https://une.shorthandstories.com/facilitating-not-gatekeeping-the-une-project-transforming-the-student-experience/index.html

• Contact:
• UNE Media Team
• +61 2 6773 2551
• [email protected]