Vol. 22 No. 1 (2025): Quarterly Issue 1

Student Experience

• 'It's the best way to learn': Face-to-face attendance in university language courses

  Bonnie Thomas, Marinella Caruso, Kati Tonkin, Josh Brown, Sabine Kuuse

  The arrival of COVID-19 in 2020 marked a radical change to the university learning environment. With lockdowns and restrictions of various kinds, teaching and learning within the university had to shift to online and alternative modes of delivery within a short space of time. While life has gradually returned to ‘normal’ and students are increasingly physically present on campus, patterns of attendance and engagement seem to have altered. Although, anecdotally, many students have reported a renewed appreciation of face-to-face teaching – particularly in relation to learning a foreign language – there appears to be an overall drop in on-campus attendance since COVID. This study investigated students’ reasons for attending or not attending face-to-face language classes. The aim was to inform changes to the teaching and delivery of our courses that could increase student attendance, engagement and overall retention. Through an online survey focusing on different factors that influence student attendance – using a combination of multiple choice, ranking, and open-ended questions – the study identified key reasons for students’ decisions around class attendance.

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• Student Voice: Reviewing two decades of the literature to guide the next 20 years

  Dr Sally Ashton-Hay

  Attention to students and their education experiences has become increasingly important in the 21st century. Student experience - particularly active and agentic practices captures in terms like 'student voice' and 'partnership' - was an obvious choice in response to Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice (JUTLP) editors' commissioned series of literature reviews analysing 20 years of the journal's publications. A hybrid method for the systematic review was guided by the question: What has been published about student voice and partnership in JUTLP, and how has this scholarship evolved over the journal's 20-year history? A student voice and partnership framework adapted from Fielding (2004, 2012) was developed to provide theoretical guidance for the review. In total, 92 publications were identified and described quantitatively (year, country, research design, etc) and qualitatively using reflexive thematic analysis. Overall, the findings show increased publications over time that document active student involvement in developing, shaping ,designing, evaluating or researching alongside staff. The upward trend of partnership is a marked change from early JUTLP publications that studied students as objects of research and sources of data with passive roles in education practices and student life activities. The trend is toward students as active, agentic participants, partners and leaders in shaping and influencing their education experiences. Moving into the next 20 years, the JUTLP community is urged to engage with students as co-authors, co-researchers, and co-designers to report on educational praxis with staff and to open up new avenues for student contributions to knowledge and the mission of JUTLP.

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