12. “The art of conversation”: Educational guidance practitioners and support for distance-learning students

Introduction

Educational advisers in conversation

Principles of telephone guidance

Elizabeth Shakespeare: As a guidance practitioner, what have you found to be the most important principles of guidance when supporting distance-learning students over the telephone?

Sean Starbuck: The most important thing is creating the space. At a campus university, that might be a separate corner of a room, or an office. Over the telephone it is setting out our stall that we are here to spend time with someone and, of course, that is part of the contract that we create with them about the time we have and how we can use it.

Stephanie Newton: Like Mark, I think we try as far as we can to set ourselves apart from the university and that we do not represent a particular agenda. It’s trying to give that unbiased approach to helping them feel comfortable and open-up in guidance conversations.

Sean Starbuck: If we imagined this visually, we would be walking side by side with the student.

Oliver Burney: I agree. One of the principles we use and try to convey is: I believe in your potential. I’m here to help you to express yourself, get somewhere and get to some actions. You’re accepting of the whole person and welcome them even with their issues or problems. With distance-learning students, you realise they’re sitting in their house. You’re trying to make that more present, that moment, they’re in their house, doing whatever they’re doing. You can hear the dog barking. You notice those things because it’s important to it being a real experience, where students bring their whole selves, rather than something transactional between two people.

Holistic guidance at a distance

Elizabeth Shakespeare: The reality of our work is that students are in their home situation and surrounded by their things, or at work, or some other personal context. How does that shape your guidance practice? Working over the telephone, how do you ensure you consider this student holistically in the context of their wider environment and lives?

Mark Kershaw: Using something like the helicopter approach where using language you travel through the layers of perception up to a point where you get to that sense of this is my motivation. This will. This is why I’m here. Using both visualisation and metaphor are colourful ways of exploring ideas over the telephone.

Oliver Burney: That’s one of the challenges with telephone guidance is making it memorable.

Stephanie Newton: The telephone can be less inhibiting for some students – more so than video call even—in that they feel a bit more anonymous. However, it makes it a very different experience for us because we can’t see the person in front of us, so we can’t pick up on those visual clues about how they might be feeling. We have to do a lot more listening and questioning than you might have to do in person.

Oliver Burney: That’s anonymity, isn’t it? Which is disinhibiting, I think.

Emancipatory guidance practice and its challenges

Sean Starbuck: This is something that I’ve tried to integrate into my day-to-day practice. We have to be conscious of our mindset and suspend judgement. Students can present in a way that it feels that that they’re facing an uphill battle or there’s very little progress or there’s the conditions in which they’re working within, which are making things very difficult for them to succeed or to inch towards their goals. Many students haven’t had the opportunity to reflect; guiding them to see where their strengths are in other parts of their lives and how they apply to study, you’re almost building that wall from scratch, brick by brick.

Sean Starbuck: I think sometimes our role as a default can feel too neutral. Not that I want to take a directive approach as my default, but a student’s path is going to be easier to navigate if they don’t have lots of social structural factors working against them. By offering the same approach for every student, that’s an inequality in itself, isn’t it?

Sean Starbuck: I also think guidance has a unique role in that because we’ve all had those conversations with students where you realise this is the first time they have allowed themselves to vocalise something. That’s a radical thing because society doesn’t tend to give people that space. That’s not what’s seen as worthwhile or productive because it’s intangible. It’s often immeasurable. But the things that students can tell us after a conversation with us, you can see the growth.

Elizabeth Shakespeare: This is something that they take with them in the way that they face the world, and the way they think about themselves in the world. That’s one of the most precious things that we can do for them. That does make me feel hopeful.

Some (hopeful) principles for remote educational guidance

Cutting across our conversation was the sense that guidance practice has often been about helping individuals to navigate structural or societal systems that do not work well for them rather than addressing the macro issues. However, we began to explore the place of a low-tech or “old-tech” telephone conversation in this (Simpson, 2000).

We reflected on the way the telephone requires us to interact differently than we might do in person in order to be able to convey our fundamental belief in the strengths and abilities of the student. We addressed how we each navigate the tension between a necessarily broad “helicopter” approach (Arthy, 1999) allowing us to see and “unpick” wider and deeper issues being raised, with the requirement to be boundaried and structured. As others have noted, “effective use of the telephone requires, and therefore encourages, discipline […] The lack of access to visual cues can be compensated by greater attention to aural cues” (Watts & Dent, 2002, p. 4).

Steps toward hope

References

Arthy, D. (1999). A cultural analysis of parachutes, regulators, and helicopters in career planning. Australian Journal of Career Development, 8(3), 1–8.