RAPPORT
Issue 5 (August 2020)
Background
Who delivers academic support?
At the same time as there has been a
growth in provision of academic tutors
there has also been a marked increase in
the growth of professional services
providing academic support. As UK
institutions of Higher Education have
grown in size so there has been a
proliferation of adjunct, centralized,
academic support services; librarians
delivering information management
seminars, writing centres offering
workshops on academic writing, online
proofreading services and peer-led
student groups to support transition and
induction. Such services offer efficiency
savings to the university by centralising
delivery and offering services staffed by
professional services staff, students and
volunteers rather than by more expensive
academics. This service provision frames
student academic development as the
acquisition of a series of transferable
'study skills', an approach that has been
robustly critiqued as fragmented, generic,
and deficit-focused (Lea & Street, 1998,
Lillis, 2003, Wingate, 2006). Such
provision seems out of step with our
understanding of how students learn to
write in their disciplines and works against
our developing comprehension of the
nature of these discourses they are
acquiring (Nesi & Gardener, 2012).
The question as to who delivers academic
support to students is an important one
given face-to-face meetings with
academics are a costly resource. What
then do academic tutors uniquely offer
that can't be delivered by other staff?
While some commentators identify the
key feature of an academic tutor to be
their interpersonal skills and the quality of
caring or being a person (known to the
student) (Clegg & Rowland, 2010), others
suggest that their chief value is their
disciplinary understanding and knowledge
of university (Jacobs, 2005).
What is addressed in an academic
tutorial?
In spite of the number of policy papers
committing to academic support provided
by subject academics (Malone, 2018)
there is a vagueness concerning precisely
what happens in academic tutorials:
‘there is a lack of reference in the
literature to the review of academic
skills as an individual task of
personal tutoring. This raises the
possibility that although often seen
as central to the personal tutor role it
is also an assumed activity’ (Small,
2013: 4).
In a typical American tutoring model,
academic advisers (who are not faculty or
academic staff) assert that ‘advising is
teaching’ (Lance, 2009: 1) and they
include in their remit ‘academic skills
required for study’, although on
examination this is closer to centralised
study skills instruction. This is not to
suggest these skills are unnecessary or
instruction unappreciated. Lea and Street
(1998) acknowledge study skills as a prerequisite
for higher level learning. The
issue is really whether centralised
provision across teams supports
disciplinary learning and what the
relational implications are of cross-service
academic support.
Of the many skills university students
need to develop to be successful, writing
skills are nearly always vital since the vast
majority of assessed work at university is
in a written mode (see review of
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