Setting Forth

My main role within UAL is as a tutor on the summer Pre-sessional English (PSE) courses. My first year was 2019, which was face-to-face in Camberwell, and proved to be a fantastic experience: I was tutor to a class of 18 students, all East Asian (mostly Chinese, but also Thai and Korean), and the majority intending to study at LCF. It was the shorter 9-week course, where the students have to make a moderate amount of progress in order to proceed onto their chosen undergraduate course. Tutors operate in pairs, and sensibly I was partnered with an experienced tutor who held my hand throughout. We taught each other’s classes for half of the timetable, and my buddy’s class was also mostly Chinese, along with some Japanese students. Everyone worked hard, and I was so happy when all students in both classes achieved their needed grades.

Then the whole world changed.

In 2020 I was invited to return, but to teach on the longer 19-week course in which students were starting from a weaker position and had to make a more significant amount of progress in order to attain the required language level. The students in my class (my only class, as ‘buddy teaching’ was paused to allow us to spend more time with our tutees) were noticeably weaker than my 9-weekers from 2019. The reason for only teaching one student group was that we were now online as a result of the pandemic, and the 19 weeks were actually stretched to around 25 weeks, as the contact hours were reduced from 4 hours a day to 3, in realisation of the new online paradigm. (I have remained online since, but 4 hours a day has resumed and this year we also returned to buddy teaching.)

The structure of the shorter 9-week course is based around summative assessments that cover the four language skills of writing, speaking, reading and listening, whilst the longer courses (13 and 19 week) have purely formative stages before running in parallel with the 9-week classes. Until recently, the summative assessment task for writing has been a critical essay, and our Core Materials provided a lot of support for this. Students will submit an essay plan to their tutor, and later a draft essay, and they receive feedback on both these formative stages. They then submit their final essay for grading, and do not receive feedback.

Returning to 2020, I received an email from one of my students informing me that she was unable to continue on the pre-sessional due to what she termed a ‘depressive disorder’, and that she was on medication for this condition. This was most of the way through the course, as she had already submitted a very good essay first draft and appeared on track to meet her grades across the four skills (a couple of students did not achieve their required grades, so this student was definitely not a weak one). I notified the PSE leaders and our welfare officer, but sadly we lost her from the course. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that I am ‘haunted’ by this event, but it has stayed with me, and sometimes wonder if there may have been any way to have avoided it happening. In reality, it appears that this student’s issues were something that she bought into PSE, rather than being caused by the pressures of the course, but it’s certainly possible that the demands of the course may have exacerbated her condition.

Around the same time as I began teaching on the PSE this year, I began also to think about the coming Action Research Project and a possible theme. The idea of the students’ mental health and wellbeing came to mind. Whilst this is an area that has received much attention in recent years, I feel I am largely ignorant and this could be a good opportunity for me to significantly raise my awareness and make some small changes to my teaching practice. Pre-sessional is a fast-paced course, and if students don’t achieve the required results they will not be able to progress onto their chosen main course of study, and if you will excuse a little hyperbole, means that someone doesn’t realise their dreams. This can be a cause of anxiety and stress for these young adults and so I feel we have an obligation to minimise this as much as possible.

My initial ideas address three areas for exploration, which can be summarised as ways in which:

• the existing curriculum could be adapted (or at least presented) so as to reinforce the importance of wellbeing;
• experiencing the arts can be of benefit to wellbeing;
• a teacher’s use of language can have a positive or negative effect on students’ wellbeing.

With these ideas in focus, I can begin to plan my Ethical Action Plan for submission to my tutor (next post!).

There has been a marked emphasis on social justice within this course, and I believe my chosen topic does indeed address this. Bhugra, Tribe and Poulter (2022, p.4) define social justice as “the virtue which guides us in creating those organisations called institutions … [which] provide us with access to what is good for the person, both individually and in our association with others”, and then add that “social justice imposes on all of us a personal responsibility to work with others and design and improve institutions”. Of course, whether a particular student has a mental health issue, or is susceptible to developing one, we frequently will not know – maybe the student does not wish to reveal, but also they may not have awareness of their state – the general approach, I believe, is to be non-discriminatory and treat all equally, so whatever this project’s conclusions will be, they should be applied to ALL students.

Because these ideas coincided with the onset of this year’s course, I did begin to make adjustments to the way in which I speak with students. If I have a catchphrase it would be ‘keep busy’, uttered when signing off at the end of the session, and there would be frequent reminders of due dates to minimise chances of missing deadlines whilst working on different tasks simultaneously. But this year I began to question my own practice, as I wondered if I may be unintentionally contributing to levels of stress or anxiety. I would still remind them of their need to ‘keep busy’, but this was mixed with reminders to get some down time: there is a slight lull in activity when the formative phase ends and the summative begins, and I took the opportunity to encourage students to take advantage of this, before the weight of the final phase sets in. I was making my initial first steps on my own journey through this project.