BILT Team: Hi Susan, thank you so much for joining us; the first question is, how are you feeling about being one of the keynote speakers at the BILT 2026 conference – entitled ‘Student-Centred By Design’?
Susan Kenyon: I’m feeling super-excited. It’s great for me to be able to talk with you about the research that I’m doing. But what I really love about conferences is learning from others. I’m a bit of a magpie in my teaching approach. I like to steal bits from here and there, so coming to Bristol is going to be brilliant.
BILT Team: And you mentioned some of the research that you’re engaged with at the moment – what sort of research is that?
Susan Kenyon: At the moment I have two ‘streams’ to the work that I do. Both are shaped around inclusion. All of my career has been focused on alleviating social exclusion, trying to encourage inclusion. I started off looking at transport and social exclusion. Basically, if you can’t get places, you can’t do stuff, and the stuff that you can’t do is important. And that’s my entire
25-year career summed up in a single sentence, really. And that obviously applies to Higher Education as well. So, I started looking specifically at HE and transport-related accessibility in 2008.
At the time, the government had a policy to bring higher education into local communities, bringing HE into where people live, rather than expecting people to travel to a remote campus. The aim was to open it up, make HE seem relevant and attractive, important and just a normal part of the community.
So that was where I really started thinking about the physical accessibility of HE. I worked at the University of Kent at the time, which was setting up the Universities at Medway, a partnership between three universities in the south east, which sited HE within a low participation neighbourhood, to encourage participation. I started to think about travel to university from home, rather than student accommodation and about how accessible learning really was. There were lots of assumptions about transport accessibility – that siting the campus in this area automatically made it accessible – but this isn’t the case. There may be a shorter distance to campus, but unless transport is available, affordable, accessible and acceptable, students still can’t get there. Then I looked at accessibility at a campus uni and found that travel within the large, 300-acre campus was often very difficult, too.
I left HE and went to work in industry / government for a little while, again on transport, and then came back into HE and really focused on the transport and social exclusion side, looking at commuter students: students who don’t relocate to attend university, but continue living at home, rather than moving into student accommodation. That’s one area of work: how do we make HE more inclusive for commuter students, focusing on transport-related educational exclusion?
The other stream is the pedagogical side: how do we improve or adapt the way that we teach to make it more inclusive for our students, not just commuters, but all kinds of students, really teaching for the people in front of us?
I was Faculty Director of Learning and Teaching here at CCCU and we set up the School of Engineering. As I discovered an engineering pedagogy called CDIO, conceive, design, implement, operate, which is a really active way of learning for engineers. It was originally designed to improve the industry-readiness of ivy-league engineering graduates in the USA. I’ve taken that and applied it to the Social Sciences at a widening participation university and it works, which is brilliant…and we’ve had some fantastic results, including a 100% first-time pass rate for 5 cohorts of second years. Again, trying to move away from that traditional form of teaching in the Social Sciences and integrating different pedagogies from other disciplines – back to my ‘magpie’ approach, that I mentioned earlier!
So those are the two areas of research that I’m mainly involved in.
BILT Team: Thank you, that’s really insightful. That idea of ‘what works?’ is a really key point. Have the two topics that you mentioned seen changes in recent years?
What’s driving this current research?
Susan Kenyon: I think as participation in HE has widened, and with the massification of HE, we have many more, what you might call non-traditional students. We also have: many more commuter students; the economy; the perception of higher education; the employability focus. So, very many aspects of what higher education is now, mean that we need to look at different ways of teaching, particularly at an institution like mine.
But also, I am a co-convener of the Teaching and Learning Network for the Political Studies Association and really deeply involved at a discipline-level as well. And colleagues across all of our universities are finding exactly the same: that the composition of who they’re teaching is changing. We have to teach for who is in front of us. For example, research-intensive institutions like the University of Bristol, may have had a certain kind of student five years ago, but demographics have changed dramatically, perhaps in response to reduced numbers of international students, which we’ve seen across the sector.
We know that about half of all university students now are commuters and that’s a massive shift. It’s been gradually increasing. It isn’t a post-COVID blip. It has been gradually increasing and it’s across all of our institutions as well. My research suggests that, across the sector, between 12% and 85% of students at our universities are commuters. In other words, the university that has the smallest percentage still has 12% commuters. That’s more than one in 10. And then the higher percentage is 85%. Almost 90%, almost 9 in 10.
Here at Christ Church, it’s about two-thirds who are commuters. So, arguably, we’ve structured everything about our learning and teaching around the residential assumption, but it just isn’t true for a great many reasons: structural changes in society and politics and economics and just the changing nature of HE. There’s so, so much change and we need to adapt; adapt or fail. Adapting to commuters is an existential question for a great many universities.
BILT Team: If we think about kind of influences, what sort of learning and teaching has influenced your practice and what are you sort of still curious and intrigued by?
Susan Kenyon: I’ve had a bumpy journey in HE. When I went to university, it was back in the 1990s and with hindsight it wasn’t a good experience from a learning and teaching perspective. Entering with three As and leaving with a 2.1, I think you could say that I had a negative learning gain!
I disengaged very quickly. It wasn’t a good experience, and I thought that’s just what university was. I thought I was the problem. Then I went to do a master’s somewhere else, and it was incredible. I felt visible. I felt seen, and it was just the most amazing experience. I realised, actually, HE shouldn’t be something that makes you feel bad. It should be something that enables you to feel good, to put it very, very simply.
I think learning and teaching for me is attractive for two reasons. One, you’re supporting people and helping people, which is really important, that social justice aspect. But the second thing is that it’s like a puzzle. And if you enjoy research, like I do, and like most academics do, it’s a puzzle to solve.
The puzzle becomes: how do you do the very best job that you can? Which means that you need to understand what the very best job means for your students. You have to understand your students. And every day is that active, iterative research process. When I’ve taught colleagues how to teach in HE, I’ve always tried to sell it in that way. Whatever your practice is before you came into HE, look at HE like that. If you were an academic researcher: see teaching like research. If you were a journalist, or a medical doctor, or a nurse, or whatever before you came here: see it like that. Use the same critical skills and see it as this wonderful opportunity for you to continue researching, just with a different subject. You wouldn’t base your normal subject on guesswork and you wouldn’t do just the bare minimum for your normal subject. So why would you do that for teaching? So, teaching’s a puzzle that’s waiting to be solved and that’s what makes it exciting.
BILT Team: What are your characteristics as an academic member of staff? What would we experience if we were in a session with you?
Susan Kenyon: It really depends. I think my students think I say ‘it depends’ far too much! But it depends on the subject, the level, the people in front of me. Each session is very, very different. And I think it has to be. There’ll be active learning, for sure. I will have expected you to have prepared for the lecture because we teach in workshops. We don’t have lecture-seminar. We have 3 hours, which is a workshop where there will
be lecture elements, but there will be independent learning as well. As we go up through the levels, I expect more for my students, and I try to include a reading group as well. Teaching in
Session 1 looks very different compared to Session 10. When I go into Session 1, I assess the levels, the confidence, I understand who has a learning support plan. I find out on that personal level who is able to contribute at that stage and work with each individual. I have quite small cohorts, up to 30, so it’s easier to do than if I had 300. By the time I get to the end of the module, I want everybody contributing. I want everybody able to speak to a research paper, for example. Even if it’s just three bullet points, I want them to have the confidence and the skills to be able to do that. And by and large, we always get there.
BILT Team: Is there anything in your practice that you’ve just described that has been influenced by your work on commuter students, or reducing those barriers and creating more in inclusion? Is that in your day-to-day practice, or is that more of a systemic consideration for the institution, or is it a bit of both?
Susan Kenyon: It’s certainly a bit of both, but the way that I teach is focussed very much upon belonging.
The way that I teach is really focused on trying to help people to realise that they belong in HE. And I’m not even slightly perfect at all in doing this, but my aim is to make everybody feel that they belong, because I didn’t when I first got to University. At the start of every year, I always mention Cilla Black’s ‘Blind Date’ – you know, ‘what’s your name and where do you come from?’ I tell them that, ‘well, actually, I’m first in family, low-participation neighbourhood, not really ‘traditional’. Every day I think I shouldn’t be here. And it took me a very long time to realise that I belong. But I do and you do too.’ So, trying to speed up that process of belonging for our students is really important to me.
BILT Team: Okay, so the final question is: why should we be excited about the future of learning and teaching in HE?
Susan Kenyon: At the moment, it can feel like hard work, because we are experiencing so many economic, political and technological changes. But it won’t always be hard work. We will continue to need HE and to need teachers. Students are going to continue to need to learn. It’s just tricky while we all find where our place is. I think students are trying to find out what their place is as well.
It’s naturally going to be a very unstable time. So why should we be excited? I guess you could go back to the 1990s as a time of change and it’s exciting to think about change. I think someone like me, the research that I was doing first in 1998, when I first had my first academic job, I was looking at the impact of the internet. The internet was brand new. It had been around for four years and very, very few people had the internet. And there was so much hyperbole about how the internet was going to change everything. Including teaching and the need for HE. For me, it was genuinely very exciting to be part of what felt like a revolution. But I can imagine that 30 years ago, academics who were my age then were thinking, ‘oh, bloody hell, this is tough!’. And maybe that’s where we are now.
But again, if you like learning and if you like puzzles, there are a lot more puzzles to solve. There we go. That’s it. If you like learning and you like puzzles, then that’s why it’s a good time to be in HE.
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