Supporting students to make their academic footprints

One of my most vivid childhood memories is waiting eagerly for snow to fall in winter.

What I loved the most was putting on my wellington boots, rushing out of the back door into our little garden and putting my footprints in the pure white carpet before me.

I absolutely loved the opportunity to make my mark, to be visible, to create a newly trodden path. There was mischief in it, too. I wanted to spoil the unspoilt, make imperfect what had been perfect. It was my favourite thing to do.

I use this as an analogy frequently with students who are reluctant or under-confident writers. Frequently, this is signalled by what I judge to be an over-reliance on text a student has found online, or they will be striving for a style which imitates how they think they should sound.

Over the last five years of my teaching career, I’ve found that written work submitted by students increasingly bears the hallmarks of AI-generated text: slightly too polished, robotic, and very different from the way they speak and write in lessons. The saddest aspect of this for me is that students are not developing their own “voice” in academic work. I believe that a crucial element of my role as an educator is to encourage students to believe that this voice – by dint of its uniqueness – is just as valid as anything they might find online; that it is, in fact, better because it is authentically theirs.

I want them to write with confidence, as if they too are stomping in fresh snow.

The confidence to sound yourself

I began to wonder recently what leads to these tendencies, and simultaneously to question whether the way I view AI in general is archaic. Certainly, the direction of teaching and learning at UK universities would suggest I need to move with the times and think differently.

A Higher Education Policy Institute report published this year found that up to 94 per cent of students regularly used AI to help with assessed work and that the responsible use of AI was increasingly being taught in universities. Rather than viewing it as a threat to scholarship, many academics are exploring the ethical use of AI with their students, taking the opportunity for critical debate on transparency and accountability while also understanding the inevitable role AI will play in students’ employability and future lives.

Vilifying AI won’t solve its problematic place in academia, while an open and proactive debate will promote critical thinking and a sense of personal responsibility, encouraging students to make informed choices about how and where they use it. I’ve realised that my innate sadness when students don’t seek to put their own metaphorical footprints in the snow is about much more than a lack of confidence when writing. I think it is about confidence in academia in a broader sense; about students feeling safe enough to take a risk with their own voice, with their own identity. To understand this, we need to look at the ways in which university systems are themselves becoming outdated, and the requirement for leaders to shape the culture of universities into being truly inclusive.

Are you good enough?

Nowhere is the notion of a required standard of performance more entrenched than in a university.

Students are continually required to demonstrate that they are academically good enough through assignments, presentations, and examinations, and through participation in traditional ways of working: the tutorial, the lecture, the workshop. What universities now understand is that this doesn’t work for every student. Yet meaningful differentiation frequently only happens when a student has felt able to share differences and request reasonable adjustments; and this does not happen all the time, particularly with non-visible disabilities.

UCAS data indicates that only around 50 per cent of students with a mental health condition, for example, disclose this when applying for university. Autistic students may not share their identity for myriad reasons; some have found that disclosure results in them having to educate their tutors about autism, in addition to the burden of their own academic work.

The broader issue is that educators are still planning and teaching for the student they expect to encounter in their tutor groups – the “implied student” – and as this implied student is neurotypical, universities are simply not run with neurodivergent students in mind. But it is not only neurodivergent students who are a marginalised group in academia.

Students from low-income families, even when they have reached academic entry requirements, continue to be underrepresented by a third of UK universities. Black students face systemic and complex issues, reporting feelings of isolation and educators with low expectations of their ability. When we consider that black students are less likely to receive a “good” degree classification than white students regardless of prior attainment it is clear that change is urgently needed.

More than a mission statement

Addressing these issues requires more than lip-service to a vague idealistic inclusion agenda or shiny mission statement.

It requires academic leaders who are prepared to boldly address these systemic inequalities which are so hardwired into our academic spaces that they are accepted as inevitable features. Disguised in plain sight as “the way things are,” or in platitudes like “some students are just more academic than others” these biases and assumptions perpetuate inequalities which have begun well before university life.

Developing an authentic academic voice takes time. It requires not only mentors who understand the starting point of each individual student, but an environment which values these differences, viewing them not as problems to be solved but necessary and enriching elements of an inclusive student community. To achieve such a significant change, academic leaders need to see the creation of truly inclusive environments as a strategic imperative, investing time and expertise to promote student communities which are more authentically representative and diverse. This does not mean reducing academic rigour. It does mean a healthy questioning of outdated and limiting systems and ways of occupying the academic space.

From my experience, when provided with a safe space to be themselves and given the message that their voice is good enough, students’ confidence shows in their academic work, which becomes an authentic extension of who they are. They take risks with their writing, explore concepts more thoroughly, and learning becomes a joyful experience again.

The onus is on university leaders to promote a culture where every student is truly valued for their unique identity and for how they will choose to lead academia into the future. For me, this is the very essence of what teaching and learning should aim for: to imbue a student with the confidence to be themselves, write with their own voice, and make their own footprints in the snow.