The Relaxed Tutorial Project

• Project Team: Trevor FearNaoko YamagataCora Beth FraserArdle Mac Mahon
• Subject Discipline: Arts and Humanities
• Theme: Equality, diversity and inclusionOnline and blended tuition
• Project Aim: Enables more students to achieve their study goalsImproves and enhance the learning experience of studentsPromotes equality diversity and inclusion including reduction of degree awarding gap
• Status: Complete
• Date: September 2021 to October 2023

‘Relaxed’ events are held across the Arts sector, primarily as a means of accommodating neurodiversity, but also as a way of suiting other specific needs. Drawing on best practice from museums and theatres, a set of guidelines for a Relaxed Tutorial will be developed and implemented on the module A340.The purpose of this project is to investigate the impact of holding one tutorial for each set of Learning Events which is designated and advertised as a ‘Relaxed Tutorial’.

‘Student engagement and participation’ is a phrase which has in recent decades come to dominate the discourse of teaching and learning in Higher Education, along with ‘active learning’, ‘The Guide at the Side rather than The Sage on the Stage’, and other formulations which assert the superiority of a particular form of learning and teaching. At the same time, ‘lurkers’ are stigmatised, particularly in online environments, as people who do not make a contribution to the group.

Gourlay (2015) presents the ‘tyranny of participation’ as a problem of policy, training and metrics; but it has its root in ableist perceptions of desirable interaction. Common in scholarship (eg. Coates 2007) is the contrast of ‘active’ with ‘passive’ learners. Such a valorisation of active learning is the current norm in the literature, and can be exacerbated by unacknowledged ‘positionality’ and ‘insiderism’ (Macfarlane and Tomlinson 2017: 10) on the part of researchers whose values support a definition of conspicuous activity as effective, and whose research is funded by schemes which seek to establish a link between activity and effectiveness.

This project seeks to investigate what happens when we stop prioritising visible interactivity in tutorials, and instead prioritise comfort, the removal of pressure, and accommodation of complex needs including neurodiversity, caring responsibilities and social anxiety.

Research Questions:

1. Does a tutorial which is advertised as ‘relaxed’ appear to be an attractive option for students, and if so, why?
2. How does the set-up of a relaxed tutorial affect the student experience?
3. Would students who have attended a relaxed tutorial like to have access to more relaxed tutorials?