T&L Funding schemes open - PLanT and T&L Initiatives

This year's Partnerships in Learning and Teaching (PLanT) Projects Scheme and Teaching & Learning Initiatives Funding scheme are open for applications.

The PLanT scheme provides funding of up to £500 for small-scale collaborative projects where students and staff work as partners to identify problems, find solutions, and enhance teaching and learning at the University.

In 2021/22 the PLanT scheme funded projects including:

• A collaborative project between students and staff in the School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science and at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, China. The staff project lead, Dr Hong Yang, recently commented, “This project provided a valuable opportunity for staff and students to work together to explore Chinese students’ concerns and challenges when transferring to the UK. The proposed measures will help promote international student mobility in the post-Covid era.”

• A study investigating students’ experience of assessed group work in a Legal Skills module in the School of Law. This involved a survey questionnaire of 140 first year undergraduates and more detailed focus groups and one-to-one interviews with twenty students. The staff project lead, Sharon Sinclair-Graham, explained, “The objective of the study was to look at the embedding of employability skills in the module and assessing where gender and intersectionality biases were overlooked. The findings of our study indicated that disabled students had a far more negative experience compared to non-disabled students. Female students reported greater anxiety about group work than male peers. 45% of male participants reported feeling relaxed or very relaxed about group work. When combining female students with a disability, nearly 46% described it as a negative or very negative experience. We are currently writing a case study for this PLanT project and hope to publish it by the end of the year.”