Читать книгу The Wiley Handbook of Sustainability in Higher Education Learning and Teaching - Группа авторов - Страница 27

University students are inherently transient members of the university community, both through the year (marked by holiday periods and uneven academic workloads) and due to the time‐limited nature of their studies (typically three years for non‐vocational, undergraduate courses in the UK). In the SSH project, annual turnover of housemates was enforced to allow a new cohort of students each year to live in the SSH. However, many students were informally associated with the project before becoming a resident and stayed involved in the project in some way after they had moved.

Students' transience can pose several challenges for activism projects (Laycock Pedersen et al. 2019). Ensuring ongoing maintenance and continuity can be logistically challenging (especially for the garden) and requires students to plan for maintenance during their absences. Furthermore, maintenance of such a project is so demanding that it can limit the types and amounts of new projects students can take on. One interviewee (Year 2) expressed disappointment with what was achieved in their year, feeling that in that year they had “only continued” rather than added to the project. Creativity and agency are important aspects of both learning and motivation and therefore opportunities for students to exercise these through new project developments are not only desirable (Briggs et al. 2019), but necessary for the project to contribute to activist learning. As such, there is a tension between the need to support students with new projects and encourage students to maintain and continue with existing projects.

A chronic issue within transient projects is knowledge handover (Laycock Pedersen 2019). This issue is particularly acute for the SSH because of students' relatively limited food growing competencies. To mitigate the lack of a handover, students were encouraged to produce a report or other artifact to pass on their project learning (including such prosaic information as crop rotations used) to the following year's students. This was carried out partially and reluctantly and, likely as such activities felt like “work,” competed with formal curriculum deadlines and/or there were no consequences for outgoing residents if this information was not completed. Knowledge was likely more effectively transferred where more informal student involvements overlapped between years. Subsequent housemates living in the SSH in 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 set up and developed a shared drive with resources, photos, and guides which help address the knowledge transfer issue.

At the start of each year, the new housemates demonstrated limited understanding about the complexity of driving real change. For example, their insight was limited regarding the need for involvement and negotiations with diverse stakeholders. In particular, there was a lack of understanding about the importance of negotiating with the university in order to carry out activities (such as digging, hedge trimming) in the SSH grounds. Many change projects require development of relationships and trust between diverse stakeholders over long‐term periods beyond the timescale of any one student's time at university (Brinkman and Hirsch 2019). This means that if university staff have negative experiences of one group of housemates, it can tarnish the relationship with the next. As a result, long‐term stakeholders need to understand that each set of students comes fresh to the project, without the learning and experience acquired by previous students. There also needs to be an understanding that the SSH is intended to be fundamentally pedagogical in nature, and therefore the tangible outcomes of student projects may vary in quality and impact. As such, it is important that there are permanent members of staff who understand the pedagogical nature of the project to support and mediate good quality student–university relationships.