"[As Learning Developers] a significant aspect of all our work is to help especially ‘non-traditional’ students become familiar with and powerful within the exclusionary practices of Higher Education. Our students swim in educational currents composed of the over-riding narratives of assessment, SATs, League Tables, OFSTED, moral panics about plagiarism – and the ‘dumbing down’ of education – for which they are personally blamed: ‘There are Mickey Mouse students for whom Mickey Mouse degrees are quite appropriate’ (Starkey 2002). They are caught on a cultural cusp (Medhurst in Munt) negotiating tricky academic space which is more of a trickster space for them. How far are they supposed to lose themselves and become another in this alien landscape; and who gets to choose the transformation – and where do the boundaries lie?

A negative take on our work and integration practice is that we are re-territorialising our students, taming them to allow them to participate successfully in Higher Education (see also arguments about skills – socialization – academic literacies, Lea & Street 1998). As Andrews (2010) states, this happens often with the notion of a deficit model in which the students are thought to lack something – usually competence in writing academic English:

‘Notions of deficit seem to be part of institutional – and some individual’s – thinking. In the cases of institutions, some provision has to be made for those students who do not appear to have the requisite linguistic and compositional skills and capabilities for success in higher education. However, a deficit notion can easily turn into prejudice. Some teachers and lecturers that ‘overseas; or international students for whom English is not a first or native language ‘cannot argue’; that they ‘come from a culture in which argumentation is not encouraged’; and that they ‘defer too much to the teacher, practising a passive uncritical mode of learning’ (Andrews 2010, p.92).

In this context, we developed and teamed up two BA Education Studies modules - Becoming an Educationalist (BaE) and Peer Mentoring in Practice (PMiP). We hoped our new year-long Becoming and semester-long Peer Mentoring modules would create the spaces, fissures and cracks for students not traditionally welcome in the academy - fissures and cracks where they might develop belonging, self-esteem, voice and personal power; spaces and places for them to re-territorialise as educational nomads (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 2005)."

We hope that our courses introduce students to ways of acting powerfully within eduction as it is - and that the courses also constitute a lens or tool with which to critique that very education system - if they wish to.

All the best,

Sandra