I mentioned the TAFE project with Dr. Susan Emmett (Sue) in my last post so I thought I would give the full story now. Sue and a number of FedUni academics did a small survey in 2016 of students that had come from TAFE and entered FedUni with at least one unit credited. They presented their findings at a conference but never published a journal article from it. So they have all this data that is just sort of sitting there. Essentially it’s asking students that went into second year university from TAFE if they feel disadvantaged because they missed all the support services which are aimed at first year students. There was mixed results. Most had faith in the practical skills and saw it as an advantage but struggled with the nature of independent learning at university.

Sue told me about it sometime in 2020, after we were well underway with our first article. She asked me if I wanted to come on board with the rest of the team and get that article published. I wanted to finish our current article first (and that turned into multiple publications so it’s still not quite “finished” in that sense). We also talked about how the data was 4 years old and would probably be 6 or 7 years old by the time we were actually published.

One thing I should add here is how it all made me feel. I didn’t even have 1 publication yet. Just finished Honours, no Masters, nor PhD. When Sue asked me to join this project it said a thousand things at once. It told me she had faith in my abilities, including research and writing, that she enjoyed working with me, that she wanted to work with me again on a longer term project… you get the picture. It was a huge compliment and it felt great! Of course that meant I couldn’t say no, but the topic interested me so that wasn’t an issue.

Sue and I decided to treat the original project as a pilot and do an expanded repeat of it with students from both FedUni and CQU. We contacted the original team and only Talia Barrett had the capacity to join us. So now that is the team, Sue, Talia and I. It has been lovely to get to know Talia as well. She is not a teaching academic, she works in the department that provides all the student support services; mentors, PASS sessions and so on.

We updated the survey questions and turned the project into mixed-methods with follow-up focus groups after the initial survey. We could copy some of the ethics application from the original project, which we knew had passed ethics, so that saved us some time. Still it has taken over a year to get to this point – ethics has just been approved at FedUni.

Next on the to-do list is to copy and paste those details across into the CQU ethics. I’ve had to contact our ethics people to add Sue and Talia in the system. So data collection at FedUni should start next semester which is rather exciting. I will be conducting the focus groups from FedUni and they will do the ones from CQU – all online of course.

The other significant thing that has happened in this project is the development of a framework that we intend to use to structure our discussion section. Ella Kahu has published multiple articles on and around a Student Engagement Framework (SEF) which beautifully brings together student factors like attitude, self-efficacy, motivation, then socio-cultural factors, institutional factors and so on.

In the more recent works Kahu talks about the educational interface – the place where the student meets the university. This is essentially the area we are exploring in our study. So I suggested we use the SEF. Then a few weeks later I read a couple of articles by Eugenia Katartzi and Geoff Hayward. They have a framework specific to TAFE students which brings together Bourdieu (who I’m quite familiar with) and Bernstein (who I’m less familiar with). They talk a lot of the power relations and how “TAFE knowledge” may be considered less than “university knowledge”. When I read about it, it was clear that their entire framework would fit nicely within the educational interface that Kahu proposed.

Talia and Sue loved it – so I was happy. But still I felt the need to ask Kahu herself what she thought (before I modified her amazing framework). I contacted her via email and explained my idea as well as attaching the articles from Katartzi and Hayward. She thought it was an excellent match up and essentially gave us the go ahead. It was another huge compliment, one I’ll never forget. On that very positive note, I should end this post. I have marking to do!