Hello,
I
can understand the concern about travelling to the USA. Perhaps a little
background would help shed a little light on the current situation. Five
years ago, a few of us at the University of Westminster who were concerned
about the importance of personal tutoring thought it would be useful to get
together people from across the sector to share ideas. We approached the
HEA with this idea and they agreed to support the first conference by admin
support, advertising, bookings etc. We thought there would be a small
group interested in attending. In the event, we had over 130 and had to
turn some away.HEA continued to support personal tutoring. For our
second conference, we invited NACADA to participate and to provide a keynote
speaker. This led to discussions about holding joint conferences.
All concerned thought this would be an excellent idea in order to learn from
each other. This was realised last year with the first international
conference (the previous two had been national conferences). All of the
people I have talked to about the Edinburgh conference agree that it was a
great success. It is therefore surprising that the HEA decided that
personal tutoring was NOT one of the areas that they were going to
support. What this means is that this year we have no official backing
from HEA for the conference - indeed if it were taking place in this country
there would be NO conference at all! Individuals within the HEA
have been excellent in providing some advertising etc to
help participation at the Pittsburgh conference.
I
think we have clear evidence that personal tutoring is an important topic
within higher education. Although an excellent idea to participate
with FETN, I do think that many of the issues are different in HE.
I feel very strongly that we should have a national annual event - this
does not need to take the place of an international event. If others
feel the same way, I would urge you to contact the HEA and request that they
support personal tutoring events in next year's budget. Meanwhile our
association with NACADA means that we can have a conference this year.
For those of you able to attend, I look forward to seeing you in
Pittsburgh.
Best
wishes,
Professor Paula Hixenbaugh
University of Westminster
Hi everyone,
I feel it can only be useful to extend this to HE
to increase the range of opportunities for colleagues to share ideas and good
practice on personal academic tutoring.
Daphne.
Sally Wootton wrote:
I agree that there needs to be a UK based network and opportunities
to share and develop good practice in personal tutoring, particularly as
many in the FE and HE sectors are unable to fund attendance at such
conferences abroad.
It may be of interest to know that the Further Education Tutorial
Network (FETN) held their first annual conference last year which was very
successful and the second conference is being held next week, Tuesday 20th
Nov, at the Sheffield Hilton. The conference is concerned with many generic
aspects of tutoring useful to both FE and HE institutions
alike.
I would welcome your views on whether you feel it advantageous to
build on the work of FETN to incorporate Higher Education. Furthermore, if
colleagues would like information regarding the conference next week please
feel free to get in touch.
Sally
Dr Sally
WoottonTutorial ManagerWakefield
College Tel: 01924 789756
I think we need to have some
sort of UK-based conference to enable networking to take place for those
unable or unwilling to travel to the USA.
How can we ensure this happens
via the HEA? (I’m afraid I am a bit green on such
matters).
Do others feel the
same?
Jan
Jan
Huyton
CardiffSchool of
Education
UWIC
Cyncoed
Campus
Cardiff
CF23
6XD
Tel: 029 2041
6499
Sent: 12 November 2007
18:04
To:
[log in to unmask] Subject: Re: FW: Second International Conference on
Personal Tutoring and Academic Advising
It seems the HEA's work on Personal
Tutoring has left the country! Last (calendar) year my colleague and I
travelled to York for the conference and found it
fruitful. Last (academic) year it was held in Edinburgh in
conjunction with NACADA. As someone whose job-share role is to do this kind
of work and nothing else, I pointed out the difficulty involved in having to
travel approx 475 miles and therefore take an extra day each end of the
conference for people low down the food chain like us. This academic year it
seems from Helen's posting the option is to travel to Pittsburgh for a 3-day
event, and it is not apparent from the HEA personal tutoring web-page that
it is currently planning anything
else!
The purpose for the conferences
apparently was to "allow academics and others to discuss key points such
as:
what personal tutors are and what they
do
what
makes them effective and how they work their relationship to the University
and student services more generally the history of personal tutoring in
the UK."
I guess there was always a tension
between role support and the academicisation of the conferences. Arguably
publication is needed for status reasons in HE. However even if I wanted to
fly to another continent or submit myself to US security clearance, which I
don't, I suspect the best I could hope for if I asked to go to this
conference (3 days plus time to travel between continents plus travel costs
plus hotel costs plus conference fee [not specified]) would be
laughter.
We certainly need some training and
support for people carrying out this work as a main or freestanding role - I
have a new colleague starting out next week. If it it exists I would like to
know what and where it is. This list is barely active and the conference
seems to be for something else. Please can someone tell me what I'm
missing?!
Paul
Dr Paul
Hubert
Student Advisor (job-share) KentLawSchool EliotCollege University of Kent http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/currentug/lawadvisors/index.html
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