Contributed by Mark Bright-Allinson (APVC Teaching and Learning) and Tansy Jessop (PVC Education and Students)
The seventh BILT conference was an inspiring event that buzzed with scholarly ideas and energy about a community intent on being student-centred by design.
Jo Hartland (Medical School) opened with a powerful challenge to the prevailing understanding of inclusion, highlighting that higher education has often built on a culture of exclusion. Jo argued that curriculum and assessment design needed to consider who might be excluded, and emphasised the diverse range of obstacles which directly impact students’ access to and experience of higher education. What we might think of as ‘extra time’ as an adjustment for some students actually represents ‘enough time’ for them to complete an assessment safely. Jo concluded that true inclusion means dismantling and rebuilding systems which exclude, and that justice must be the key consideration in planning curricula and the wider university environment. You can read this preview conversation with Jo on the BILT website.
In her closing keynote, Susan Kenyon (Canterbury Christ Church University) picked up on many of the same themes in her discussion of commuter students. The numbers of commuter students are rising across the country, with UCAS application figures for this year show that 39% of students are intending to live at home. In universities similar to Bristol, commuter students account for a fifth of all students. Susan argued that universities are still operating on the spatially separate model of two hundred years ago and that this leads to less engagement, lower attainment and a worse experience for commuter students. CCCU has carefully mapped its students’ circumstances to identify that for a large proportion of their students, 9am classes are inaccessible due to transport and other constraints. Susan advocated a compassionate learning environment for commuter students as for any others facing exclusion, ensuring that students always feel welcome even if they do have to miss some classes. She made the point that in-person classes need to be worthwhile and that active learning approaches have much to offer. Read more about Susan’s work in her pre-conference interview here. Common to Jo and Susan’s contributions was the idea that we need to challenge ourselves to deliver on the promise of widening participation, by adapting our practices to avoid excluding any of our students.
Participants asked lots of interesting and affirming questions of the keynotes, and raised a few complex further challenges about the nature of fairness, the questionable value of anonymity in marking, and the conundrum of commuting students making all the effort to get to campus and finding very few peers in their classes, especially towards the end of term.
Nine workshops ran in parallel sessions through the day, with reports on innovative practice from around the university and opportunities to reflect on how these might be rolled out in other schools and programmes and a focus on active learning and AI. There is only space to give a flavour of these here. Keith Beasley (Geographical Sciences) introduced the principles of Consciousness Education as part of a discussion of how to (re)connect students to their learning and ensure that they appreciate the human dimension of their education in ways that AI will never match. Rose Murray and Rebecca Pike (Biological Sciences) reported on their experiences of integrating the Bristol Skills Profile into the curriculum with a range of tools to help students map skills and feedback on student work. While students generally found these tools useful, it was only by formalising their use in units as a small assessment component that most students were persuaded to use them. Paul Hendrie (CALD) ran a practical workshop on creating educational tools with AI, emphasising the importance of keeping human teaching and judgement, and students themselves, at the centre of education, and highlighting the care that is needed in checking exercises and resources which AI creates.
Highlights from a (non-exhaustive!) selection of the presentations attended included:
- Ashley Dodsworth’s thought-provoking challenge to understand what lies behind student absences, and ways we might research and address this;
- Gaurav Saxena’s explorations of how PGR students are using AI in their research;
- Improving research literacy through engaging with AI in a Psychology Research Methods unit (Laura Contu, Michael Smyth)
- Exploring student perspectives of how and when it is acceptable to use gen AI (Craig Gunn)
- A double act from Dave Jarman with Timothy Senior and then Peter Bartlett, providing practical insights into how CFIE successfully engages interdisciplinary teams of students in group work through the course of their degrees;
- Keith McLoughlin’s interdisciplinary offer on a History unit about technology had an interesting spin that asked students to ‘bring a STEM friend’ to a project session.
Alongside the sessions, the BILT conference was also an occasion for celebration. Judith Squires presented CREATE awards for outstanding work to Sarah Liddell-Durnin (Humanities), Vickie Zhang (Geographical Sciences), Simon Thornton (Medical School), Paul Griffiths (Chemistry) and Pippa Sterk (SPAIS). Details on the BILT website here. In recognition of their contribution in founding BILT and firmly establishing it, Ros O’Leary also made presentations to Judith Squires and Alvin Birdi.
Once again, Ros and the BILT team have produced an outstanding and inspiring conference, with plenty of food for thought and practical ideas to address current challenges. We’re already looking forward to the 8th conference next year, which will be Wednesday 30 June 2027 at Temple Quarter, but in the meantime the BILT website has plenty to keep us busy.
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