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Issues Paper 8: Student Centred

No matter how much effort universities put into teaching graduate attributes, the strategy hasn’t worked unless it is perceived by students to have actively engaged them in developing worthwhile attributes.Higher education is fundamentally about ensuring students are changed in particular ways by their learning at university. Statements of graduate attributes (GA) are universities’ attempts to articulate what this change is. However, indications are that the messages about learning articulated by GA statements are not getting through to students. This might mean that students don’t understand what we are saying and doing about developing GA, or that they hear it and dismiss it as irrelevant or, that they don’t hear it at all.

A recurrent theme in AUQA reports is the observation by the audit panels that many students are unaware of their institution’s GA – or if they are aware, then it is in a shallow or surface manner as lists of somewhat ‘meaningless’ skills that other people have said are important. Beyond the repetition of the vocabulary of these lists, students find it difficult to articulate what these skills and attributes mean in the context of their individual learning and identity as a university student. Neither can students readily identify how their learning experiences at university might have contributed to the development of the espoused attributes.

It would appear that many current GA strategies have not successfully engaged students. This lack of engagement by students is perhaps not surprising given the confusion amongst many in the rest of the university community as to the nature of the ‘it’ in which we want them to engage. However, even where clear messages have been sent about GA and where long-standing and comprehensive strategies are claimed to have been implemented, the impact on students is not always apparent to either the students or others. This raises the issue of effective student engagement as a potential challenge in its own right.

For some students, GA are seen as ‘a list of things that other people say [we] they should develop’ (according to a third-year student); and for others the perception is that GA are ‘a bureaucratic tool that teachers are supposed to list on subject guides and in assessment (criteria) checklists’; it appears that for many students GA ‘have no meaning’. Such perceptions by students do not come from nowhere. They are shaped in part by the things we say and do as their teachers and advisors and to a large extent their lack of engagement with GA is simply a reflection of their teachers’ understandings. This highlights the importance of addressing teachers’ understandings and, more importantly, it highlights the need to work with students to develop their understandings of GA as useful and important outcomes with lifelong implications.

There is no doubt that many graduates do see their university education as a significant formative experience and that being ‘university educated’ means something to graduates and employers. However the ideas about ‘what it means to be university educated’ have become uncoupled from discussions about GA, in both teachers’ and learners’ minds. Graduates struggle to articulate what it is they have learned in their university education in CVs or interviews. Perhaps this is understandable given that what many universities in Australia intend their statements of GA to articulate are complex learning outcomes. However, in the minds of students and graduates; while they ‘know’ their university education has changed them, they struggle to express the nature of this change in a convincing manner, especially to future employers. Moreover, students are failing to see GA as a useful framework around which to structure their university learning or to assist them to recognise and explain what they have learnt.

The need to work with students to help them understand and engage with GA has been recognised by many universities, although at present many of the potentially excellent strategies that have been implemented remain disconnected from an ‘institution-wide’ and ‘education-long’, student GA-engagement strategy. There are many efforts embedded within First-Year transition strategies to induct students into university learning, and GA provide a potentially useful framework for helping

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students come to interpret their university experience. Such conversations might be begun in first-year transition activities; however it appears they are not consistently built upon as an ongoing dialogue with students about what a university education is all about. Nor is the rhetoric of such conversation always matched by the actions of universities in the way they communicate to students about what is important to learn to pass their courses. The messages – some subtle and some not - sent by universities about what is ‘valuable’ to learn and what constitutes a valuable learning experience (be quiet and listen to me!) are worth reflecting on in terms of the messages students receive about GA. These messages shape students’ learning behaviours and while policy might ‘say’ GA are important our ‘actions’ may be speaking louder than our words – and saying something quite different.

Some in universities claim that students come to university only wanting a degree, and while many students publically disagree with this characterisation, there remains a lack of recognition by many involved in the debate that GA can be as much about preparation for successful employment as for a good social citizenship. All too frequently the conversations the university community has with its student members about graduate attributes do not communicate this message (see ‘Stakeholders’ paper).

The ways universities engage students in their GA efforts are largely limited to a consultative role. Students are typically consulted in the development of GA statements often through their participation on university committees, and consulted after the event – usually through the inclusion of GA-specific items in course evaluation or satisfaction surveys – Did your course help you develop generic attributes? Such consultation rarely constitutes authentic student engagement in the university’s efforts to develop GA. New initiatives that give students greater agency and awareness of their role in developing GA provide some ideas for more meaningful engagement. One potentially powerful strategy involves the growth in career development planning and personal portfolio use by students. These tools have the potential to put GA at the heart of how students approach and organise (how they engage with) their learning. Student portfolios could be structured around the institutions graduate attributes as an articulation of complex learning. Such a portfolio organisation would help students to focus on, and recognise the results of such learning. However most Australian portfolio use is not yet structured around complex conceptions of GA. Moreover what many see as the ‘real’ university assessment currency – the marks and grades assigned for coursework – is also rarely structured around such attributes and therefore provides a powerful distracter to any potential benefits of portfolio assessment. Career Development Learning provides another opportunity for dialogue with students about their learning at university (and beyond). Again, it is only a tool - so if the conversation about learning is focussed on what students perceive as a ‘bureaucratic meaningless list of simplistic skills’ to be ‘ticked off’ then the conversation is unlikely to be productive. Perhaps most challenging of all, is achieving the student engagement necessary for the development of what these papers refer to as ‘Enabling’ attributes, considered by many to be the most important of all. Enabling attributes, are characteristic of the statements of attributes described by most Australian universities. These intellectual and scholarly ways of thinking, ways of relating to other members of society as a citizen, and developing a commitment to lifelong learning are fostered through students’ engagement with a community of scholarly citizens. However the opportunities for such engagement are increasingly limited for many students. Staff are often too busy to do more than the bare minimum in terms of out of class learning interactions with their students. Students are traditionally excluded from staff members’ research activities. And students rarely share in the somewhat limited ‘service’ work of universities with their surrounding community - the somewhat neglected third aspect of academic work. (Some would argue that current changes in university work mean that the poor quality of life that is left for students to engage with is an even greater worry than the limited opportunities for student engagement!) However turning to the slightly less daunting task – how might universities facilitate student engagement with the university community in order to foster these most complex and prized graduate attributes? There are again examples of potentially effective strategies. Efforts in many universities to engage more students in research experiences and to give them access to the research life of the university offer great potential, although few Australian universities have realised this in the way that American and Canadian universities have. The other is the emergence of service learning as a new set of learning opportunities within the Australian university experience, a strategy that has achieved much success in US and Canadian institutions (see Bowdon, Billig & Holland, 2009). This strategy links ideas of citizenship and contributions to community initiatives with students’ formal university learning.

Unless students are meaningfully engaged with institutions’ efforts to foster graduate attributes, those efforts will have little impact. How that engagement is achieved seems at first, time consuming and complex, however at its most simple what it requires is that university communities once again

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start to have meaningful conversations with students about what university learning is all about, and make sure that the learning outcomes articulated as GA and the learning opportunities provided in courses and rewarded by assessment, match the rhetoric of these conversations.

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