Personal Academic Tutoring - The Cornerstone of Inclusive Community

Remember your first day at university? Here in the Business School, it’s like arriving in a small town where 80% of people have lived there a few years – but you’re in the 20%, so you don’t know where anything is or any of the rules. Moving into the 80%, it’s still challenging, especially the complicated regulations and bizarre cultural practices.

In the Business School, taught programmes often enrol large cohorts from around 50 countries. The potential for confusion or distress, alienation and disengagement, is significant. So we put energy into personal academic tutoring to keep our house in order. We’ve learned three things recently:

1.  See and be seen - students want to see staff regularly, and weekly tutorials worked beautifully in enabling that inclusively for everyone;
2.  Listen and interpret - personal academic tutors are translators, enabling students to develop and understand the language and practices that our large, sometimes threatening, institution is built on;
3. Use the tools we have – Senior Tutors, HEFi, experienced colleagues can all help with short exercises, ideas for conversation, indicators of what students might need to talk about during the year.

The university is our house – it belongs to the staff and students who build, maintain, and renew its intellectual and cultural habitat every year. Personal academic tutoring can be an academic and social cornerstone, mostly invisible but practically essential. Above all, it makes this place much better to be in, for our students and for us.