Deficit to development: rethinking centralised workshops

Abstract

Centralised academic skills provision has been criticised for being ‘generic’, ‘remedial’, or ‘bolt on’ (Wingate, 2006). Critics argue it takes a deficit approach towards student learning, simplifying academic processes and failing to meet students’ discipline-specific needs. Embedded provision is often seen as the solution. However, embedded does not necessarily mean non-deficit. Indeed, Schneider (2023) highlights that academic tutors can perceive students in relation to skills they are lacking. Subsequently, Learning Developers can be brought in to ‘fix’ students, and as such, embedded sessions may still be disconnected from the curriculum and designed to offer pre-prescribed solutions, reflecting deficit approaches. As Webster (2023) asserts, the Learning Developer’s role is not ‘to give students academic skills’ but rather to help them make sense of the skills and literacies that are hidden in the curriculum.

In this workshop, we discussed how we redesigned our entire skills programme using a non-deficit pedagogic approach that aims to help students ‘uncover their curriculum’. Inspired by the University of Manchester’s constructive and collective approach (Blake and Illingworth, 2015), we see our co-curricular offer as providing a unique opportunity to create empowering and developmental learning spaces which sit alongside embedded provision. To meet these aims, our redesign was informed by four principles:

• Reflection: centring students’ prior knowledge and experience.
• Collaboration: harnessing knowledge from a community of learners, rather than a ‘sage on the stage’.
• Choice: students customise their own learning experience, tailoring sessions to meet their own needs.
• Application: students relate session content to their own discipline and apply learning to their own work.

Workshop participants considered debates around deficit thinking in relation to centralised training, working together to redesign learning activities and reflect on the opportunities and challenges of such an approach.