A few weeks ago Mike posted a blog post entitled “Academic Representation Utopia” in which he outlined the three key things you need for good representation: Structure, Engagement and Partnership. So, here is my take on Academic Representation at Heriot Watt.
Structure
For me, the structure is key. If you have a little representation here, and a little there, yes you get student opinion, but you get no consistency, and messages get lost in the system. At Heriot-Watt, I like to think our structure helps to avoid this.
We have Class Reps, who are the eyes and ears, the massive group of students who ensure that every class has a voice, and who can also spot problems at an early stage.
Then, we have people like me – School Officers. We work to ensure the class reps are looking for the right things, and telling those things to the right people, while also work ing on bigger issues, that are affecting lots of different classes, or even whole-university issues (such as IT systems).
After this, there are several routes on the structure. First, you have the staff in the department; always the first port of call, with almost all problems solved either through Class Reps talking to staff, or through meetings such as the Staff Student Liaison Committee. The second channel is through the Union, where discussions between School Officers help to share best (and worst) practice throughout the whole university. The union also deals with issues that are not being resolved in schools, and is able to push for strategic change, with the President sitting on many of the universities key decision making boards, including Learning and Teaching Board, where Academic Policy is set.
So this structure allows for the passage of information from the normal student to the decision makers in a maximum of three steps. Minor issues can be easily solved at a class rep level, whilst strategic issues can be solved at either union or university level. This structure also greatly aids the union in finding what students think on a variety of issues in a very short space of time – allowing them to represent the views of real students, and therefore, get what students want. At Heriot-Watt, the structure works.
Engagement
So, engagement – It’s a tough thing to quantify, and it’s even harder to get it right. As a School Officer I struggle with engagement daily; we have some amazing class reps, and they go above and beyond what they are asked to do – but there are weak links, and where there are weak links, it’s a great struggle to ensure student opinions are heard.
It’s often spoken about in representation-land that students are Apathetic, and that they just don’t care enough to spend time to make things better, but this view doesn’t sit well with me. In the time that I’ve been involved in representation, every time you speak to students you realise something: students do care, and they want the education they get at university to be the best.
So why is engagement a problem – well, there is often a lack of trust that the system is effective, and a misconception that Staff-Student committees are just forums for people to have a moan and be ignored. There is one solution to this, and that is building from the inside, and selling the idea through wins, shouting when we get something changed for students.
Do we do it well? Sometimes. Would I say enough students are engaged in representation? Occasionally. Could we do better? Definitely.
Partnership
It’s a nice word – Partnership – working in tandem, together and in sync. It can’t possibly work in reality, can it?
Well, I think it does work, and it works pretty damn well. As a School Officer I work in partnership daily with the university, and working with (rather than against) the university is what allows the structure outlined above to work. We trust them to do the right thing, and they trust us to tell them what we really think. This trust reaps rewards in that small problems rarely become large ones, because there is a constant conversation between staff and those representing students. Generally speaking, it is only when this partnership breaks down that problems become unmanageable and more serious. Yes, there are times where it is impossible to work with the university, as the view we have, the stances we take are polar opposites (Such as Rest-of-UK Tuition Fees, for example), however, these cases are rare, and usually are on national or strategic issues.
Partnership works, and it’s probably the most important of these three things to get right. With no partnership, the structure would not work, as you’d have to campaign at every level, fight a battle every step of the way, whilst engagement could be higher – results would likely be less.
Utopia?
So, do we have an Academic Representation Utopia at Heriot-Watt. No – but we do pretty well. Systematically, we have few weak links; the structure allows for rapid gathering of information amongst the whole student body, and trouble-spotters in each and every class. Where students are engaged, the results can be amazing, shown by how few issues get escalated out of the department (You can count on one hand how often this happens annually in most departments). But, we can improve, we can involve more people and there is one thing not mentioned in the original article that I believe is the key to greater success…
Communication
We live in the information age, and its easier than ever to communicate with vast numbers of people, but far too much gets lost in the “fuzz”.
Representation is a two-way street; and we’re pretty good at going down the street, gathering the facts and working out what going on, but far too often thats where we stop. We don’t make the return journey, and disseminate what has happened, we simply do not tell those that we represent what we have done for them. This, in my mind at least, is why engagement is difficult – results speak louder than anything else, one “win” can set a representative body in good stead for years.
So, how do we communicate effectively? Well, it’s difficult, and there is no one answer, but in my opinion, transparency is key. The more we show students what we do, the more they will trust us to do it, and therefore we can do a better job of representing them.
It’s a tough issue to crack, but I believe websites like this are key; giving representatives a platform to share what they are doing. It can be done better, and there are battle to be won in giving student representatives space to share what they’re doing in places like Vision (Heriot-Watts Virtual Learning Environment) – students access this platform daily, and if we can put information at students fingertips, awareness should increase.
Communication must be done better if we are to improve representation. We must invest time and effort into publicising what the representation system does, how it works, and how we’ve changed things.
Because we have changed things, and we should be proud of it.
