Below is the first meeting transcript of an academic study skills workshop refresh for proofreading live-streamed at the ‘Pedagogies of Hope’ conference.
The exchange is between Iqra Malik (Student Team and Widening Participation Intern), Lily Pearson (Student Team), Nikki Tomlinson (Learning Developer) and Bonnie McGill (Learning Developer).
We have presented the exchange as a transcript to demonstrate the collaborative, democratic approach of the University of Manchester Library Teaching Team, grounded in radical pedagogies (hooks 1994; Freire 2017), in the hope that it might inspire other institutions to similarly ‘challenge structures and roles’ (Heard-Lauréote and Buckley 2022, p.37). The Student Team co-create workshops as equal contributors (and as paid staff members) ‘by sharing their lived experience, knowledge and advice’ (Aston et al. 2021, p.3), rather than just being brought in as a focus group.
Bonnie: Let’s start from the ground up. What do we want this workshop to achieve?
Lily: We need to start by thinking what the students want to get out of the workshop – what they are expecting and then what we want them to achieve.
Nikki: And having something practical that they can start to work on within the session and then take away. I used a style guide when I was writing my PhD thesis to keep a check on consistency. Students could tailor this to their assignment.
Iqra: The workshops are currently humanities-focused, as we’ve seen from feedback, so this would help with encouraging STEM students to come along. How about working with Artificial Intelligence, Grammarly, ChatGPT?
Bonnie: Let’s include AI within the workshop. It could be a good talking point around what questions to ask if using it in assignments and what to be aware of. The issue with any kind of Artificial Intelligence is that it is reproducing a very particular kind of academic writing.
Lily: Right, it doesn’t know what you meant necessarily as it can’t always read context. The workshop could be then around the value of students proofreading their own work as a skill within their degree.
Nikki: Could we use ChatGPT to write an article and then we introduce errors? This would help mitigate the ethical implications of changing an author’s journal article.
Iqra: This could be the first activity then, working through the article and spotting errors. But this shouldn’t be about a race to spot the most, not a competition.
Lily: No, right – it should be about thinking what you do commonly in your own writing. In terms of mistakes.
Nikki: Then the second activity could be about using what was noticed and what was missed in the students’ own style guides. They could create one in the session for their next assignment.
Bonnie: Nice! Ok so to re-cap: an activity around practising proof-reading, then another on creating a style guide, individually, for an upcoming assignment. Let’s also talk about the issues of outsourcing proofing to AI.
Iqra: Who’s doing what in terms of creation?
Lily: Iqra and I would do the workshop plan.
Nikki: I’ll do the activities.
Bonnie: Slides for me. Great, I’ll book in a meeting to catch-up on this in a month.
In terms of workshop outcomes, 100% of student responses rated the structure, content and facilitator as ‘excellent’. More widely, Student Team co-creation has led to members successfully gaining AdvanceHE Fellowships, including Iqra being awarded Senior Fellowship. The Student Team have won awards for Teaching Excellence (2023) and Inclusive & Accessible Teaching Practice (2024), have gained teaching experience, presented at national conferences, and have now hosted their first 10-year anniversary symposium with attendees from across forty universities.
Our advice for establishing meaningful co-creation partnerships includes: be the voice advocating for students as colleagues and pay them for their time. This invites diverse opinions and enables students from a variety of backgrounds to be involved. Student Team members provide relevant and timely insights into wider student experiences. The workshop participants then benefit from these perspectives.
This method of co-creation promotes an institutional culture that places student voice at the heart of its teaching practices (University of Manchester, 2023).
Aston, S., Stevenson, M. and Inala, P. (2021). Facilitating connections and supporting a learning community: together. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, (22).
Freire, P. (2017). Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Bloomsbury.
Heard-Lauréote, K. and Buckley, C. (2022). Exploding Hierarchies for Educational Change: Leveraging ‘Third Spaces’ within Solent University’s Transformation Academy. Agile Learning Environments amid Disruption, pp.35–49. [online]. Available from: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-92979-4_3 [Accessed February 13, 2023].
hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge.
University of Manchester. (2023). Empowering Student Partners: Working with our Library's Student Team. Available from: https://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/news/display/?id=30050 [Accessed May 28, 2024].