Galloway, K; Bradshaw, R --- "Responding to changed parameters of the law student: a reflection on pastoral care in the law school" [2011] LegEdDig 26; (2011) 19(2) Legal Education Digest 33

• Responding to changed parameters of the law student: a reflection on pastoral care in the law school

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Responding to changed parameters of the law student: a reflection on
pastoral care in the law school

K Galloway and R Bradshaw

Journal of the Australasian Law Teachers Association, 2010, Vol 3, pp 101-112

The Bachelor of Laws (LLB) at James Cook University (JCU) has relatively open access compared with many universities in metropolitan Australia where students are still likely to comprise an elite (both in terms of socio-economic background and prior academic achievement). JCU students are as likely as not to be from a rural or remote area, mature-age, and first-generation university educated.

Anecdotally, the law degree is seeing an increasing number of students who are recent migrants (including refugees) and those who are dealing with adverse domestic issues. At the beginning of first year, many students report that they had only within the last two weeks decided to study law and so had moved (from elsewhere in Australia) to Cairns or Townsville. This places an additional burden on students who leave their social and family networks, and face finding accommodation and work as well as the challenge of tertiary study – and these are important factors that affect student retention.

Like students elsewhere in Australia, JCU law students undertake paid work that keeps them off campus. Although numbers of full-time students at JCU have risen, there is an emerging trend of students spending fewer days on campus and less time in classes. In 2008, 65 per cent of JCU law students worked more than 11 hours per week; 37 per cent worked more than 16 hours per week. The majority of students reported spending 27 hours per week on their studies, including course contact time. A full time load (four subjects) would have required 40 hours per week spent on such activity. These data identify a significant gap between how much time teachers expect students to spend on study, and the time students actually spend. This is borne out also in national studies.

These data are concerning: students who spend less time on campus are ‘less likely to ask questions in class and contribute to class discussions’. As learning takes place through the active behaviour of the student, a lack of engagement in educationally useful activities will counteract student learning. If institutions seek increasing numbers of graduates, then students ‘at risk’ of not participating require support. As students’ experience of learning in the transition year is a ‘crucial one that can have lasting positive (or negative) effects, depending on the skill with which it is handled’, early intervention strategies are vital to facilitate ‘an active process of constructing rather than acquiring knowledge’.

The challenge does not stop there however. McInnes reviews studies that show how students’ attitudes and aspirations are changing. He points out that changes in priorities, interests and rites of passage mean that engagement in university experience is not a ‘self-evident good’.

This change in student attitudes about their study is linked to the contemporary global economic marketplace. Pick and Taylor for example, identify a close link between student aspirations and the national economic agenda. As part of this economic agenda, universities transform graduates into workers for the new economy – steeped in cultural practices that will help create and reinforce economic goals. These practices involve ‘individual autonomy, responsibility, freedom and choice’. Pick and Taylor, through surveys of Australian students, identify that the fee-paying environment forces students to ‘become more utilitarian’ towards the value of their education. Students expect a higher income to justify the cost of their education.

Despite this context, teaching in the LLB in Australia continues to be a fairly traditional and formal mode of content-focussed and doctrinal delivery. This represents the very culture of the law and the law school that has been identified as a barrier to inclusiveness of a more diverse cohort.

This context exists also in the JCU Law School, a small school teaching across two regional campuses separated by some 350km. By 2004, with high attrition rates and unacceptably high failure rates during first year, the Law School needed to act to promote retention of its already diverse and ‘non-traditional’ cohort by addressing their learning needs. Therefore in redesigning the first year curriculum, particular attention has been paid to the transition to tertiary study – engaging students in their law study and developing their skills from the outset – as a means of engagement in the culture of academic life.

This transformative transitional experience for JCU students relies at least partly on their capacity to cope with the social and emotional contexts of study. As Endres points out ‘transformative education involves the ongoing alteration of the students’ character through a sustained personal relation’. In considering the social and emotional contexts of study, curriculum is designed using a ‘broad view’ of curriculum – one that encompasses ‘the whole process of teaching and learning and all the activities in their various contexts which take place during that process’.

If it is within the ‘academic curriculum that students must find their place, be inspired, excited, engaged and retained’, then it is important to understand the impediments faced in fostering positive learning experiences, and how to help students overcome these.

The first aspect of the curriculum lies in the more concrete elements supporting development of students’ emotional intelligence – through emphasis on emotional literacy or ‘using opportunities in and out of class to help students turn moments of personal crisis into lessons in emotional competence’. Goleman identifies abilities such as self-motivation, persistence, empathy, hope and mood regulation as elements of emotional intelligence.

In light of students’ ‘life factors’, it can be challenging for them to develop a positive ‘student identity’ with a clear sense of direction and purpose, with confidence in their ability to succeed. Like so many of their peers nationally, generally JCU first year students feel overwhelmed by what is required, feel their school experience did not adequately prepare them for university study, and are largely unaware of the many services available to them.

Christie cites studies that ‘highlight the emotional component of ... navigating the financial, social and cultural barriers that non-traditional students must overcome if they are both to gain access to university and to become full members once there’. For these students – whose background is similar to that of JCU law students – ‘the transition to university is an intensely emotional process’ and this cannot be divorced from students’ academic success.

The aim is to support students’ emotional development as an integral part of their academic development. This falls onto first year academic staff, and particularly the First Year coordinators (‘FY coordinators’) who are largely responsible for pastoral care. Pastoral care is a student-centred, holistic approach to student welfare that aims to ensure the student develops and engages meaningfully. Adopting a pedagogy of diversity, it is acknowledged that students come with a range of life experiences and contexts, often coupled with a misalignment of expectations and skill sets so pastoral care is one strategy to deal with this misalignment.

Integrating pastoral care into curriculum fosters academic and social connections as well as emotional literacy. This approach aims to provide students with insight into their own process of adjustment, that is personal to them. This fosters a feeling of control over initial social and academic anxieties. This broad approach to curriculum ensures development of skills and attributes to address students’ new circumstances. A university with a solid system of pastoral care based on the principle that the general wellbeing of the student comes first, ‘will have a smaller drop out rate and provide a positive educational experience’.

As James observes, the ‘origins of changing student expectations may lie, paradoxically, in the early formative experiences of students on campus.’ Crossling et al identify that O-week activities have potential to meet the need to ‘induct students into the wider higher education environment’. As JCU moves towards a ‘third generation FYE [First Year Experience] approach’, the LLB has led the way through active involvement in O-week, offering a workshop designed to de-mystify the legal writing process and inspire confidence in first year students. Workshop materials are integrated into the first year subject sites providing a seamless introduction into study. Feedback from students over the many years this workshop has been delivered can be summed up in one student’s words ‘I went away feeling excited about starting my course for the first time during O-week!’

Following the O-week experience, the first lectures discuss student support services and integrate a variety of student support mechanisms into the lecture itself. Bringing student mentors into initial lectures ensures all first year students have the opportunity to become a ‘mentee’. The mentee benefits from engaging with a continuing law student as a role model to help them better adjust to the university environment. Mentors help orientate first year students to university culture, and raise awareness of services and programs.

There are of course students who retreat from face-to-face engagement. In the first three to four weeks of first year, FY coordinators compile a list of students who have not been attending classes. These students are contacted to offer appropriate support.

After the formative experiences in the LLB, ongoing pastoral support is provided through the Law School Peer Assisted Learning (‘PAL’) program and ongoing social presence of academic staff.

The PAL program offers social and academic support for first year students. Such programs have potential to be an excellent tool for student learning through facilitating the development of students’ skills. They channel the experiences of final year students who provide an opportunity for first year students to self-assess and peer-assess using formative assessment practice. In the PAL environment, the peer-to-peer connection permits students to disclose challenges and misconceptions without fear of reprisal or jeopardising academic performance. Student engagement in a PAL program offers benefits such as clarification of key concepts, immediate feedback, increased motivation and reduction of social isolation.

Having only run the program for one semester, it is too early to evaluate its impact on student learning. While it is believed that the program is necessary to assist in social cohesion resulting from students’ absence from campus, those very students may not be interested in attending the program. Consequently it is possible that the program may be reinstated in semester two using online social networking sites as a forum for both synchronous and asynchronous interaction between students and PAL leaders – and of course between the students themselves. These proposed changes are part of the ongoing task of developing an ‘integrated experience’ whereby ‘social interaction adds value to intellectual outcomes’.

While PAL is one means of providing social presence, this is done also via email – weekly in first semester, and intermittently in second semester. Emails are friendly, light and positive. Their purpose is to encourage students to engage in student life by recognising the stresses of study and providing solutions to common student concerns. Students are encouraged to develop learning skills by accessing workshops and online resources. Emails also highlight activities related to campus life with invitations to seminars or cultural events. Emotional support is also provided through formative assessment. In all first year subjects, students are offered a one-on-one dialogue with academic staff on assessment tasks that are frequent and ‘low-stakes’. As Crossling et al point out, ‘formative assessment provides a vehicle for interaction between students and staff, thus helping to develop student familiarity and confidence to approach staff for additional clarification and advice’. It also allows academics the opportunity to know their students.

Neal et al have analysed women’s self-belief and self-confidence in professional domains including academe. In one case study, they report that a woman academic is ‘positioned as caring by her students who seek her consultation [but] she also positions herself in this role’. This academic ‘sees student support as part of her performance of a “good” academic’.

Balighole and Goode likewise found in their interviews that women academics who ‘found students at their door... [did not feel] that they could turn these students away’. Both men and women interviewees in their study felt that women more than men took on the emotional aspects of pastoral care.

Deem too writes that ‘women may do more of those things which are not easily measured or even noticed, such as extended pastoral care for students, than men’, Collier reports on the masculine culture of the law school, and the ‘model of academic performativity this [managerialist] process has entailed, one which is a distinctly masculine notion of labour’.

Smith analyses the higher education context (in the United Kingdom) to identify a continuum of responses to student support. On the one hand, ‘meaningful, holistic support proceeds from a position that education contains constituent elements of nurturing’. On the other hand, institutional imperatives within a managerialist or technicist paradigm, approach student support with ‘mechanistic, depersonalised and “off-the-shelf” support products’. These do not necessarily meet student need. Smith posits that communicative strategies, such as those described above, will be seen as ‘inefficient’ and ‘unproductive’ in a managerialist environment.

There is every possibility that the ‘care factor’ in pastoral care is gendered. To the extent that women take on this role, and that this role is unacknowledged within the management structure of the university, this has implications for women’s career development. Thornton points out though, that ‘caring men may also be penalised for having devoted excessive energies to feminised activities, such as nurturing students’.

This is an area that bears further research within the Australian legal education context, particularly in light of the further opening up of higher education and of the particular affective needs of law students as a cohort. At this point however it can only be speculated upon, based on personal experiences, using reflection to provide ‘insight into [our] own professional context’.

Whether or not this caring approach to curriculum is gendered, the nature of this work and its emotional aspects are not explicitly recognised or valued within institutional policies such as workload models or performance management. Student surveys of teaching, focus on motivating students and generating student interest as well as mastery of the subject and achieving learning outcomes. No mention is made of supporting students’ affective learning. In lacking recognition, this aspect of teaching is not given a value.

The difference between the reality of the emotional aspects of the academic’s work and the institutional framework creates a gap that comes at a personal cost. This can be understood, as Wharton has explained, as ‘emotional labour’. Wharton defines emotional labour as ‘the process by which workers are expected to manage their feelings in accordance with organizationally defined rules and guidelines’. She cites Hochschild, who argues that ‘emotions not only are shaped by broad cultural and societal norms, but also are increasingly regulated by employers with an eye to the bottom line’. In their study of emotional labour of academics, Constantini and Gibbs identify a tension between the academic, administration and the ‘customer’ (student).

In the authors’ case, having used personal experience to develop the role of FY coordinator, inevitably cultural and societal norms have been drawn upon – as women, and perhaps as mothers. But responses to students’ needs, based on these norms, also probably reflect an understanding of the institutional imperative to retain students. Perhaps also the institution and students position us to care.

This embodies the tension described by Constantini and Gibbs. On the one hand, the institution requires provision of an integrated transition experience for students to meet retention targets. Students require integrated emotional support – indeed, according to Constantini and Gibbs, the expectation of it, often tacit, fuzzy and implicit, comes from customers (the students), who want more than pleasant platitudes and competent service, demanding instead authentic caring, otherwise they see the falseness of the false. They know of the deceit but want to feel that they are different and enjoy the empathy of the teacher.

Responding to this need is part of one conceptualisation of a ‘good teacher’. Indeed caregiving can be a rewarding experience. There is no doubt that the JCU Law School is experiencing a high level of success in student learning through this approach to pastoral care. However as Wharton points out, ‘changes in the structure, practice, and professional norms guiding these fields have the potential to increase or diminish workers’ positive experience of caregiving’. Much attention has therefore been paid in the literature to the risk of burnout and emotional exhaustion as a consequence of emotional labour.

This lack of recognition, highlighted above, of something apparently integral to meeting institutional goals therefore represents somewhat of a paradox – or a gap between the policy and the reality of academic work.

In today’s university climate where ‘a member of staff is expected to be a world-class teacher and a world-class researcher’ something is going to give. Pastoral care incorporating the ‘care factor’ is not presently calculable and will inevitably lack value where it does not neatly fit into a performance box. This will particularly be the case if the hypothesis of the gendered nature of the ‘care factor’ is correct. As Brummell et al point out, ‘the highly individualized capitalist-inspired entrepreneurialism that is at the heart of the new academy has allowed old masculinities to remake themselves and maintain hegemonic male advantage’.

On the other hand, failure to address the social and emotional, as well as the academic needs, of students will result in a failure to achieve institutional performance indicators of retention and completion. Offering a variety of support services is necessary, but not sufficient to meet students’ learning needs. As McInnis pointed out nearly 10 years ago, ‘these academic and support strategies must be seamlessly managed and totally complementary if they are to be effective’.

So firstly, the importance of the ‘care factor’ needs to be recognised as an integral part of the teaching role. Because of the academic workload and the sheer number of students, many academics will feel unable to devote the precious time to pastoral care that they could. The role of pastoral care, including its emotional labour aspect, needs to be formally defined.

Secondly, the institutional (and governmental) measures of quality and performance need to adapt to recognise the value of pastoral care in meeting the objectives of more open access to higher education. The managerialist discourse of ‘responsiveness’ highlights the inadequacy of such a framework to meet students’ real learning needs, focusing as it does on market imperatives, client satisfaction and competitiveness. Likewise, it fails to recognise the ‘care factor’ as an integral part of the professional academic.

Research shows that ‘only those institutions that invest in ‘front-end loading’ of first year effectively address first year transition issues, including retention, progress and course satisfaction’ and therefore, institutional and governmental performance indicators. Arguably, this requires increased resources to prioritise transitional issues and formally recognise the labour and emotionally intense nature of those activities. ‘The concept of student engagement is based on the constructivist assumption that learning is influenced by how an individual participates in educationally purposeful activities’ and academics are entreated to maximise student engagement. In measuring quality teaching using ‘engagement’, the policy framework fails to acknowledge the role of pastoral care and the emotional labour involved in it. This is to the detriment of academic staff and inevitably the student.