Abstract
The present political and economic climate for universities can promote competitive learning and anxieties about individual students' academic achievements. It can inhibit the enjoyment and skill in shared learning. Group work can provide a creative, empowering avenue so students become proactive in their learning and engage more equally with academics. It has potential to enhance intellectual ability as well as social and emotional wellbeing, yet careful planning is essential to achieve this. This paper addresses the shortfall of prioritising assessment over relationships and identifies how relationships are central in preparation for assessment. It draws upon an ethnographic, qualitative and emancipatory approach to research. This approach enabled students to initiate the research focus and design of the last session. The paper identifies how the group was set up, developed and what it achieved. It makes recommendations for overcoming some tensions and fears that can inhibit effective group work so that social and emotional equity inspires intellectual development.
Highlights
University is the chance in a life time – expensive yet expansive: socially and intellectually alive
We considered to what extent we were to engage, how much of our personal life was relevant or suitable, and how did we interpret what had happened and plan the session? Argyle (1992) suggests that the enquiry that ensues, when data is open to a range of perspectives, keeps an intellectual debate alive
This ensured their ideas were implicit in the design, helped students prepare themselves for the group work, and consider what they wanted to bring to the group work
Summary
University is the chance in a life time – expensive yet expansive: socially and intellectually alive. Universities evolved as communities of Chanda-Gool and Mamas ‘Coming from somewhere else’ – group engagement between students and academics scholars and teachers, and yet Biesta (2014) argues that the contemporary economic focus on students as consumers, and on ‘learnification’, inhibits these ideal communities developing. He argues that the dialogic process depends upon the development of ‘subjectification’. Inclusive practices need to be embedded in the university’s culture so that all students have the confidence to question, take risks and develop mentally and socially (Cotton et al, 2013; Mamas, 2017)
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