A group of students from the ‘Learning and Teaching Strategy’ project present their work to a lecture theatre of academics. Nervous and excited, the students didn’t expect the response they received.

It had all been leading up to this…the Learning & Teaching conference 2016 was our chance to showcase all that we had done with our project for the last year. The project in question was to translate a complex and formal document into a student-friendly edition; after discussions, research, editing text and a creative process we believed we had achieved this feat.

The presentation was mainly spoken, with photographs as visual aids; we also provided a few infographics to present the data we collected, which can be found here.

Not only did we speak about the physical process of creating this student-friendly guide, the team also spoke about how we felt we had developed personally:

“The Partners in Learning experience has made me understand the many layers of university life. It threw me in at the deep end and made me realise just how strong I am as a person and the potential that I have to keep going.”  – Sophie Worrall

The reception at the conference was overwhelming; we had not expected such a positive response. Programme directors were asking if the team could condense and deliver a similar presentation to their students, to empower and educate on the Learning & Teaching Strategy. The Pro Vice-Chancellor was particularly touched by the personal impact working on the project had had on us. Everyone was attentive and engaged with what we had to say.

We expected to walk into that lecture theatre and be met with glares and low expectations, but what we left with was praise and astonishment from the audience of academics who perhaps had never considered students to be so capable.