RAPPORT
Issue 5 (August 2020)
The International Journal for
Recording Achievement,
Planning and Portfolios
The CRA/SEDA Personal Tutoring/Academic Advising Award: A
personal view
David Baume
Higher Education Consultant and Fellow of the University of London
Centre for Distance Education
Over the years, David Baume was a valued collaborator in several CRA projects. As a
Senior Fellow of both the Staff and Educational Development Association and the Higher
Education Academy, he was our natural choice to be the external examiner for the
CRA/SEDA programme. Over the three cohorts of candidates he provided
encouragement and wise advice which was greatly appreciated by the team.
Email: [email protected]
Introduction: recording and
making sense of achievement
I still feel that ‘Recording Achievement’
seriously underestimated what CRA was
about. ‘Recording Achievement’ always
sounded a rather modest ambition, a
matter of documents and transcripts and,
increasingly, the use of a wide variety of
media. Even given the difficulties of
finding or making an appropriate account
of ‘Achievement’. ‘Recording
Achievement’ never seemed enough.
I may have been the last one to notice
this, but, as I worked as external
examiner on the CRA/SEDA personal
tutoring and academic advising
programme, and before that as I
undertook several projects for and with
CRA over the last 20 years, I eventually
realised that CRA’s work was actually
about Recording And Making Sense of
Achievement. CRAMSA would not have
been an elegant name for the
organisation, but it would have been
perhaps more accurate.
That’s what I saw happening on this
programme. Each participant, supported
by their tutor, went round their own
version of a classic cyclical account of
learning:
• Planning to do things, in this case
devising, creating, adapting, tutoring
systems and interventions;
• Doing them, in a thoughtful and
reflective way, often with micro-cycles
of review and re-planning, the kind of
rich empathic responsive behaviour that
characterizes the best of being human
and being professional;