Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education (Oct 2024)
The rise of study skills at Strathclyde (and our part in its downfall): a bildungsroman
Abstract
In 2012, three members of staff were recruited by the University of Strathclyde to sit in a room and talk to students. That was the whole of the plan. That is not how this story ends. The talking was supposed to ‘help’ students to do things ‘right’. That is not what we spoke about. That year, the student-facing part of the Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement (CAPLE) established in 1987, which at its height consisted of six permanent academics with varied research interests within the, then emergent, field of Learning Development (LD), was replaced by a generic Study Skills Service, staffed by LD practitioners with a considerable collective experience and who shared a vision that was more critical and looked to a more authentically (learning) developmental approach (Asher, 2024). In so doing, the university had created a service model which we would spend the next nine years dismantling (or, to be more accurate, redeveloping). What follows is our story. The story of how the Learner Development Service (LDS) came into being, and how the spaces and places we have inhabited (both hostile and hospitable) have shaped our practices (Gravett et al., 2023) and how, in June 2022, we took up residency in a dedicated LDS Centre designed by us for us. To date, we have occupied three physical locations and been positioned under three different university services. These spaces and places have defined what we could do but they have also informed the design of our current physical, virtual and conceptual environment, as this paper details. This session highlighted the need for Learning Development practitioner resilience and perseverance in difficult circumstances. It foregrounds the usefulness of initiating, developing, and nurturing productive and mutually rewarding professional relationships with academic departments, course leaders and individual academics in order to advance the growth of Learning Development provision in institutions.
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