ABSTRACT
The following extract considers the place of the tutorial – the one-to-one meeting and academic discussion between tutor and student – in the setting of the university. This research interest starts from a very practical standpoint: my experiences of conducting such undergraduate and postgraduate tutorials in university departments of education in the UK. It also starts from a sense of dissatisfaction. This derives not only from the way that tutorials tend to be conducted, but also from the kinds of conversations that occur in them, and with the expectations (from both students and institutions) about their purpose. The aim of the piece of research from which the extract below is taken was to explore how tutorial conversations are increasingly being used to ‘deliver student satisfaction’. In particular, the extract discusses how the conversation, with its focus on what a student has to do to pass, to gain a specific mark or degree classification, is driven by the need to ‘settle’ student concerns. In raising issues about what kind of satisfaction can be measured using the National Student Survey, which is a now crucial element of UK universities’ quality indicators, I suggest that we might think about the issue in a different way. In drawing the reader’s attention to the work of the nineteenth-century American writer, Henry David Thoreau, I suggest that a tutorial discussion that is unsettling might ultimately be more satisfying.
