Global Advising: UK and Italy - Adventures in Advising

Guest host Dr. Margaret Mbindyo welcomes Ben Walker from Oxford Brookes University in the UK, and Chiara Bertolini and Dr. Alessandra Landini from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy, for a rich discussion on academic advising, student success, belonging, mental health, disability support, and the changing needs of today’s college students.

From the UK’s “personal tutoring” model to Italy’s orientation practices and student support, this episode explores how advising looks across borders, and what higher education professionals can learn from one another. Along the way, they discuss the importance of building community, recognizing student struggles early, setting healthy boundaries as advisors, and seeing international students as whole people, not just paperwork.

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Transcript

Matt Markin  
Well, hello, and welcome back to the Adventures in Advising podcast. This is Matt Markin, and we have a guest host for turning back with us, and that is my good friend Dr. Margaret Mbindyo from Millersville University. Margaret, welcome back.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Thank you, thank you, Matt.

Matt Markin  
And you're continuing your series. Can you tell me, before I jump off screen, where we're going today?

Margaret Mbindyo  
Oh, my, I am so excited. We are going all the way to Italy and UK, and we have some wonderful, wonderful guests or colleagues with us today who will share academic advising and student success in their countries, and how that looks like.

Matt Markin  
Alright, Margaret. Well, I'm looking forward to it. So I'm going to hop off, bring your guest on, and as always, have a fantastic conversation.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Awesome. Thank you. Hi. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. You know, this is really a global podcast. Today we are so privileged to have our wonderful colleagues from the UK and Italy, who will be discussing academic advising and student success in their respective countries, and we are so excited to hear what each one of them has to offer. My name is Dr. Margaret Mbindyo. I am a faculty member at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. I work with students who are undecided or exploring majors. I also advise students, and I teach freshmen courses that are transitional in nature, and so I want to welcome each one of you to introduce yourselves, starting with Ben, please.

Ben Walker  
thank you so much, Margaret. So, my name is Ben Walker. I'm a senior lecturer in academic development at the Oxford Brookes University in England in the UK, and this means that my main job really is to be a leader and teacher on higher education teacher education programs, so in particular I have responsibility for teachers who are new to the university gaining their higher education teaching qualification, which is called Fellowship of Advanced, but here today, in particular, as well related to that, but primarily I'm also the lead and part of the Strategic Project Team for improving academic advising at Oxford Brookes University, which is often called Personal Tutoring within the UK; however, we do actually call it Academic Advising at Oxford Brooks University, and we have a relatively new strategy and policy for academic advising and individual support of students, which I'm sure we will get on and talk about later. So, really excited to be here and connect with colleagues from Europe and the US. So, thanks so much for having me.

Margaret Mbindyo  
You're welcome. Thank you, Ben Chiara. 

Chiara Bertolini  
I'm excited to be here now, and I, my name is Chiara, and I was a student of Unimore University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and my, my life is strange because after I was a student of Unimore, and then after graduating, I completed my PhD about teaching methods, and then spent several years doing research in the field of education. I later became a researcher, and then now I'm a professor of teaching methods, and I'm not only, but I'm a coordinator of degree program from which I myself graduated several years ago. Now I'm also the president of national coordination of all such degree programs in Italy, and I'm the director of Research Center on Educational Innovation, and I serve as the university delegate for include students support for inclusivity for students with special educational needs and students with disabilities.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Awesome. Thank you, Chiara Alexandra. Please,

Alessandra Landini  
Hello. Everyone, such a pleasure to be here with you. My name is Alessandra Landini.  I'm a principal of the Comprehensive Institution School. I'm an adjunct professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and I've always been involved with students of all ages, collaborating with universities, research centers in Europe and USA. In particular, I served as a counselor and tutor for university students, and especially students with specific learning disabilities, working with the Italian Dyslexia Association for their academic and educational success.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Wonderful, thank you so much. Thank you for your introductions. I really appreciate. I will begin by explaining our academic advising model, especially in the US. We have different advising models, and before I speak about the models, I would like also to talk about the different academic advising professionals that we have, we have faculty advising in my university. Here we have the faculty advising model, and then we also have professional advisors who are not necessarily faculty, they have been employed to do the work of advising, and so I'm so curious to know whether this is the case in your respective countries. Let's start with Ben. Ben, what kind of advices do you have? Are they mainly faculty advisors or professional advisors?

Ben Walker  
Yeah, thanks, Margaret. I would say mainly what you would call in the US faculty advisors. So the dominant model within the UK is one where you become a lecturer in higher education and part of your overall lecturer role is to do academic advising or, as we often say, personal tutoring, so you have hours in your workload plan or on your timetable that is for this purpose. However, before working in higher education, I worked in further education, which is more similar to your community college, probably in the US, and there I was a student support manager who implemented a new tutorial system where we took the hours away from the lecturers, the teachers, and we had professional tutors, so, and even now in higher education, we sometimes have a mixture, so you might call it a hybrid. So, the dominant model is where a lecturer is the personal tutor. This is what most universities have. However, often we now have an element of, or a particular role that has been created that I are professional tutors, or they are pure 100% what you would call advisors. So, for example, at Oxford Brookes University, we're luckily we're lucky enough to have student support coordinators as well as academic advisors, so you have faculty advisors, but then you have a group of staff who are divided between faculties and schools who are called student support coordinators, there's a lot lower number of them, but their whole role is to play the role of a kind of academic advisor or personal tutor with a, with academic support, but with particularly pastoral support in mind. So I'd say the picture in the UK is still dominated by that faculty advisor model, but there are some changes, and maybe increasing numbers of universities are looking at either going to a professional model or bringing in elements of a professional model and having what we might call a hybrid model.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Awesome, thank you very much. Ben, how about any one of you? What kind of model do you have in Italy? Do the faculty do the advising work, or you have professional advisors?

Chiara Bertolini  
Yes. At Italian University, there are many approaches and tools for providing students of advising in choosing the best degree. Such advice include in-person meetings held in schools where degree programs are presented, but we also require record and provide on the university website a short presentation of the degree programs in a talk show format every year near February we all open days, that is, we open our degree programs to interested high school students who can attend lectures and workshops and interact with students, faculty members, and administrative staff. Finally, each degree programs as a teaching staff members who serves as a choosing advisor available throughout the year to meet with prospective students, in addition the universities as a dedicated advice office where profession. Advisor meet with the students, and through discussion suggest to inform the degree programs that best match each student's interest and talents. 

Margaret Mbindyo  
Thank you. Thank you. Chiara Alexandra, would you like to add something or no?

Alessandra Landini  
Well, I think that Chiara was very clear. I want just to say that there is a very important office for specific learning disabilities, and maybe we will clarify them this point. And it is very active, so all the students with specific learning disabilities can be supported by this service, it is very important for our university, of course. The work of the of the university is linked together with the work of the higher of the, you know, secondary school, second grade in school institutions in Italy. So we work together with the schools, we we try to work on the orientation, we work on the perspectives, and the idea of major that the students have at the beginning of their path, and we try from the very beginning of their path to facilitate the choices and understand that which is exactly their motivation, their perspective, and what they want to achieve with this, their academic path.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Well, now that you have both of you have talked about students with learning disabilities, let me follow up with a question, and actually, before I do that, I would like to say that, for example, in our university, and in most United States universities and colleges, the role of the student is very important, especially in finding the particular office that can support them if they have special needs in high school, the parents are very, very active in ensuring that their children or their seniors in high school get that those supports that they need, but when they come to college in the US, the expectation is that the student will actually go to the Learning Services Office to initiate the learning accommodations, and as academic advisors, we encourage our students, you know, when they come to our classes, when they come to the advising space to go to the learning services, if they need accommodations, so that they can receive those accommodations and be successful in their classes, that is not always the case, because some students will not, they know that they need these accommodations, but they will still not go to the learning services to report that they need those supports. My question is, How do you handle students, especially new students that come to your universities that have learning issues, you know, learning needs that need accommodations. Do they self-report, or do you allow parents to be proactive in working with the different offices to support these students? Can I start with you, Chiara, since you mentioned this as part of what you do.

Chiara Bertolini  
We have an office for disability students and for dyslexia students, and so on, and sometimes students speak about this office with parents, but it's not important, office speak about speak up with students, and we understand the ability, but the needs, and then the office offer support, offer PC, offer tablet, and so on to support students, but we, we have some, some tutor peer tutors that are senior students who support their peers and their peers in difficulties, sometimes disabilities or other problems, and these tutors support students in studying, in studying. We have also professor who. To become tutors, and this professor also monitors students' academic progress. When they identify students who are struggling, those who pass few exams per semester, they invite them for a meeting to better understand their difficulties and to activate a network of support and reform reinforcement activities. 

Margaret Mbindyo  
I see. How about you, Ben?

Ben Walker  
Yes, I think what you're raising, Margaret, is a difficult challenge, because, for example, in the UK, they are legally - the students are legally adults, so I think part of what you're asking is what do you do if students don't disclose because parents can't necessarily do that on their behalf because of the legal status. So, for example, when I used to work in further education, legally parents could tell us about these things. When you get to university, parents can tell, can still inform us about such matters, but the student has to give consent.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Absolutely.

Ben Walker  
You know, so that's how we try to handle it, but it can be very difficult. I think the thing that we try to do, compared with maybe what we have done in the past, is be far more proactive about the support that is on offer, so whether we feel that students have officially declared a disability or not, we are very much trying to take a joined up approach between professional services and faculty advisors, faculty staff, in order in for the support that they can give, and some, we've had some cases in the UK, unfortunately, kind of tragic places of increased numbers of students facing real severe mental health difficulties, and one of some of the recommendations that have come out of those cases are just about the fact that the university has to anticipate as much as possible, so to be to have, they called it anticipatory knowledge, which is interesting, and again quite a challenge, but it's really putting sort of support at the front and center of of your of the approach that the faculty will take with a any particular student, so disclosure can be a challenge, but I think it's a case of we wouldn't always just rely on official disclosure to say these are the support services that we can offer you and therefore can help you be successful in the round and and things like induction are is incredibly important here to help students feel a sense of belonging etc and to feel comfortable and I think if you have induction pro procedures that really put belong if you really design them with belonging at the center of them, then these kind of issues can be surfaced and can be identified kind of quite early on. So we're not hopefully we always will find out some information in the middle of the year, and that can be difficult, but I think if you've got induction procedures that don't just go straight in with academic content and give a real focus on making the students belong, then ensuring that they're comfortable. Then that can mean that it's much more likely for a student to disclose and to speak up about the actual support needs they have.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Absolutely, we don't use that word induction in the USS

Margaret Mbindyo  
office. So I wonder whether you mean transitional meetings when the student is transitioning into the new environment.

Ben Walker  
Yes, I think it probably is. That another way to think about it, is we have, we have numbers of weeks per semester, and it's not a very good phrase, but it's like week zero, which means there is no teaching, but it's a way of that week zero is before week one, when teaching starts, and that's when we would have our induction, and then also you have pre induction as well, with things like open days.

Margaret Mbindyo  
And in the US it's actually orientation, which starts weeks before the semester starts. Yes, and that is where students.. there is nothing academic, you know, moral of it is introduction to what is to be expected in the semester. It's talking about the clubs, how students can get involved, you know, what are the needs, you know, of the students that can be addressed before the semester starts. We are talking of students getting to know their dorms, you know, maybe in some universities, actually during orientation period, students creating a schedule for the fall or for the spring semester, so just towards two different, you know, locations.

Ben Walker  
Exactly.

Margaret Mbindyo  
And Chiara, do you have orientation or induction in Italy, and how does that look like?

Chiara Bertolini  
Some more orientation than induction, and when we talk about orientation, we mainly refer sense capability approach that is an approach aimed at people's well-being. It does rely on aptitude test, but instead focuses on developing self-awareness, a sense of such efficacy and offering real experience, such as internship, workshop, and open classes.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Alessandra would you like to add on to what Kiara said?

Alessandra Landini  
Oh, yes, I, I totally see the point of Chiara, and these are all strategies that are very well spread out in Italy, even if not all the universities has the same amount of, you know, offers and strategies to facilitate the inclusion of the kind of students. I would say also that I see Ben, what you were mentioned before, so a sort of need to emphasize, and I would say tailored, tailored the advice based on individual students' needs and background, so sometimes you use, you, you have heard talking about prescriptive advisors, so when you, you give very clear and very, very instructional advice to students, just so you know how to pay, you know how to pay the university, how to find out your, your own course, how to attend the lessons, the timetable, and so on. So we, I think, all are we are focusing on something very different. We are focusing on considering the educational differences, as well as how much is important the students experience in the very first part of their experience at the university, you know. So, this period without academic work are very important, as well as I've seen in the USA, the clubs that Margaret has cited that are very. there are very few examples of them in our universities, very differently face this aspect of the sociality in the universities in Italy. So, I've been in USA, in Cambridge, and this idea, I think, is much more Anglo-Saxon than Italian, I mean, the idea to, but very American too. I would say Margaret, because I've seen really an offer, a huge offer of possibility for the students to socialize in the universities, and this is, I think, also a matter of buildings, you know, because in Italy we have, I think, as well as in UK universities, which are really very ancient and old, sometimes the buildings are old-fashioned and sometimes ancient, really ancient. So sometimes we are struggling to find out in Italy the space for students, a proper space to allow them to find, find the others to learn together and to build maybe little communities on a specific basis. Okay, on individualized needs. So, I think that this is very important, and so this means also that we have to grow as universities in general, I think in our cultural sensitivity differences.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Thank you, Alessandra. Talking about the struggles, you know, we are faced with as academic advisors. I would like to shift now and talk about the different challenges we see as academic advisors, one thing that is very common in the US, especially with this current crop of students we are getting, and I don't know whether they are influenced by, you know, technology, which we are going to talk about, is we are seeing a lot of students with mental health issues, and I don't know, in your respective locations, whether in UK, in Italy, you are, you are experiencing the same thing, I think, as faculty, as academic advisors, we are now aware. About the kind of students we are dealing with, and a student may come in your space looking well put together, only to find that this student is actually struggling with serious mental health issues. Can we talk a little bit about that, because I feel like this is a global problem. Ben, can we start with you?

Ben Walker  
Yeah, absolutely. I think that resonates. Yeah, I think you're right, Margaret, in that it's wider than just the US. I think we could argue it's global. It's certainly the case in the UK that the complexity and number of issues, and mental health issues, in particular, that students present with is has increased significantly. So, yeah, this is something that I think that our advisors, advisors who've been in the job for quite some time, the student body has changed in this way, and but their own, the support that we give them, so that they can support students, has not kept up with that, has not kept pace. So, I think what we've been trying to do, in particular, is train our staff, but also put in place boundaries, and really well, we are making sure that they know how to put boundaries in place, and that means they need to show empathetic skills, they need to show sympathy, they need to show understanding, but also we have particular experts employed in the institution who are employed as counselors, so one thing we say in our advisors, so we in our advisor training is that they may fit sometimes feel like counselors or social social workers, but they might employ counseling skills with a small c, but on their contract they are not counselors, so there needs to be a boundary some somewhere when they think it is necessary to refer or signpost a student on to the counseling service, for example, so what we do in our training with advisors is we've done quite a lot of work around setting boundaries, for sure, and acknowledging in particular where that expertise boundary is, and it's not a case of our advisors saying to a student, you, I don't want to talk about this. You need to go to someone else, and I don't want to know any more about it. I am still the person you will come back to.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Correct.

Ben Walker  
However, just like in the real world, well, sorry, I say the real world, but when they go into the world of employment, if you need counseling and you have mental health issues, you do have to go to your what we call GP in the UK. You have to go to your doctor, so you do have to go to a stranger, sometimes someone you've not met before, who can give you expert advice, and this is where the difficulty is, because the student has built up a relationship with the advisor, and we try to support our advisors to say, yes, you are still the person with arguably the longest and most meaningful working relationship with that student, but they do need to sometimes go and talk to someone else who has, who is trained specifically in mental health issues, in order to support them. So our training of advisors involves a number of different professional development sessions, and some of them are called things like working with students in distress as an academic advisor. We have another one called working with students who have inclusive support plans, and in those sessions I run those sessions, I co-facilitate them with members of professional services, so my counseling manager, my inclusive support manager at Oxford Brookes, we all co-facilitate those sessions together, and advisors can come to us and ask about specific student cases maintaining confidentiality about how they should act, and so what you're trying to do there is have a kind of whole institution approach or a joined up approach to supporting students with with mental health issues, but yeah, I think it is an increasing problem. One of my what I also do in my supporting students in distress session is I get two faculty colleagues who are themselves advisors, but they are themselves researchers and academic experts in trauma-based approaches to supporting people in society, that's their subject, that's their academic subject as well. So they can come at it from an academic perspective with the theory and the research, and they can come at it from a practical perspective as an advisor, as well, and one of my staff, who does that, talks draws on Gilbert's work from 2009 where Gilbert talks about the three circles of emotional regulation, so drive, threat, and soothing, and it's often for all of us, not just students in the modern world, the drive to achieve your goals and perform and be a topic, be a top achiever, and the threat, which means protecting yourself, not getting made redundant, and all these things, they often become dominant, and the soothing aspect becomes minimal in the modern world if we're not careful, and I think. Quite a lot of students are the same, and so we try to train our advisors in supporting students on making sure that third aspect is not underdeveloped, to make sure that third aspect of emotional regulation is something that they are not ignoring, and we try to say, in a supportive way, these are ways that you can develop that further. So, yeah, I hope that helps.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Absolutely, that that is so important, because burnout is real for a lot of academic advisors and faculty. I mean, if we are not taking care of ourselves, we are going to be burnt out, and if someone is burnt out, you are experiencing that you cannot be of service to people, because there are so many other negative things that come with it, and so that boundary you talked about then is very important, and for academic advisors and faculty to remember that they are not experts in everything, they are only experts in their fields and within the university there is a department that, that you know, you can refer students for the service that they need, whether it's a counseling, you know, office, whether you are encouraging the student or even taking them personally, actually to go to the office, because I've done that in my, you know, in my office, where a student came under serious, serious mental distress, and I requested them, can I please take you to the counseling office, and I did, and they were received very well, so again, remembering to take care of yourself in whatever capacity you are in, whether faculty, whether academic advisor, and remembering that you know you are only an expert for what you can do, things that you cannot do, there are people that can deal with that. Thank you for that, Ben. Chiara. Would you like to add on this? We started by talking about mental health. What are you seeing in Italy?

Margaret Mbindyo  
Yes, in Italy, to help mental health are increasing, but when students talk about difficulties, often speak about speaks about difficult rate relating to studying, not to mental problem, mental problem, or mental health. They usually ask how to find materials, what topic the exam covers of how the exam is organized, and so on. They rarely mention difficulties with the professor or about relation with peers or with the will with the peers, and they also not often talk about economic or family or problem such as anxiety or ADHD, and similar issues to facilitate the acknowledgement of these difficulties, mental difficulties. University, Italian University provide counseling services. These are usually not located in the center of campus, but in more private spaces where students do not fear being seen. They are welcome by psychologists, university by psychologists who listen to them in individual sessions without judgment. These represent an initial form of support, only initial form of support, which can become the starting point for a more structured pathway if the students feel to need for one.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Thank you very much. Alessandra, would you like to add on to that briefly?

Alessandra Landini  
Yeah, briefly. Yeah, I bet Chiara is right. There is a good attention in Italy about psychological issues, and I think that our, our general aim is to foster an environment where discussing mental health is seen as normal and acceptable, and I think that maybe we should also invest more resources in equipped faculty and professors, you know, faculty members with the skills to recognize as Ben, as said before, the sign of mental disorders or distress, so to approach students in the right way. I would also add that, along with, along with all this issue. That can have also other types of issues, like poverty abuse, or lack of academic skills, or personal needs. Without the right experience to resolve these issues, or direct students to the proper resources, advisors could become overwhelmed. I think overwhelmed and feel inadequate in their positions, so I think that this is a problem that could be faced better faced by policy makers.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Thank you. Thank you, Alessandra. I really love this discussion, and it's leading me to recycle back to something Ben said, talked about creating that sense of belonging, and I would like to go back to that discussion, because our students, when they come to us in the US, those that are in the dormitory, they have left their homes, they have left their comfort zones to be in a new place with sometimes with no friends, and I'm talking about freshmen, I'm talking about that student that is withdrawn, not very talkative, not very social, the only person they know is possibly their roommate, and so you will find that creating the sense of belonging in any campus is so very much needed, and it helps students to feel like they, they can do their academic work, they can, you know, they can thrive in that environment. What do you think academic advisors and faculty need to do to be aware that that is so much needed in their office, in their classroom spaces, in their advising spaces, that sense of belonging where the group of students or the person or that student you are working with actually feels at home. What do you think we need to do? Ben, let's start with you.

Ben Walker  
Yeah, thank you. Great question, Margaret. So I think you're absolutely right in the there was a really, in the UK, there was a really comprehensive piece of research done over several years, had two phases. It's getting a little bit old now, but it's one of the seminal pieces of research into student retention and success overseen by Liz Thomas, who I know, who works at York University, and what the headline involved 20 over 20 universities over several years, and what the headline findings of that research showed was that the human side of education and a sense of belonging, and it's partly where the word came from in an educational context, this this piece of research, to a degree, is at the heart of student success. So, the research shows that that is what is kind of most important to student success, the human side of education. So, that means also what came out of that research was that students want a human face of an organization of an institution, and the person, and they also said that the human face of that organization should be within the academic sphere, and our professional services colleagues at all, we are not minimizing them, they are very important as well, but it came out just like the original tutorial model at Oxford, I'm not Oxford, I'm at Oxford Brookes University, but it's just one mile down the hill. The first universities in the world, Oxford, Cambridge, they have a college system, and the reason they have a college system is because they have a tutorial system where they each have maybe one or two students have almost individual tutorials. So, from the very beginning of higher education, then we've got this personalized approach to learning, and then if you were to fast forward all the centuries to this modern situation, it's obviously very different, but what hasn't changed is that personalized approach to learning is still really, really important, so going back to that research, that was the headline figure, that belonging is at the heart of the headline finding, that belonging is at the heart of students' retention and success. So, the answer then be there. So, the question then becomes, which is what you're asking, Margaret, how do you foster a sense of belonging?

Margaret Mbindyo  
Correct.

Ben Walker  
So, one thing that I think you foster a sense of belonging is by having that human face and having your advisors and personal tutors, as we call them, very much trained in what they do within tutorials, so for example, we have created a I created a generic tutorial curriculum. So one of the questions I found, the reason I got involved with this work is when I first became a teacher, over 20 years ago, in my case it was all about lecturing in English, my topic, English literature. English language. No one told me what I was supposed to do as a personal tutor. Yes, which is where my workers came from, really. This is the basis of all of it. So, what do you cover in tutorials? What is your curriculum? What content? If it's not specifically your subject, if it's not sport or business or science, so you need a professional development like professional personal development content and curriculum. So, I created a generic curriculum in some work that I had published, but what I was really pleased to see is that Oxford Brookes, our senior academic advisor, because we have senior faculty academic advisors, she and her team of other senior advisors took that generic curriculum and specified expanded on it, and they made a specific curriculum with it, was tailored by different levels of student levels four to seven, so degree to masters. So I think your advisors, your tutors, knowing exactly what you should talk about in tutorials, or having a tutorial curriculum behind them is important. And then going back to that piece of research, those two pieces of research, the outcomes of them were two reports in 2012 and 2017 and those reports were called the What Works reports. So, what the headline findings of that research was published, but within those reports are about 1520, different examples of what works in terms of fostering belonging in different universities, and those things do vary. The answer is that there is a bit complex, but there's lots of different things you can do. But typically they are having effective personal tutoring, advising things like peer-assisted learning, so working with student partners, that's a really big part of fostering a sense of belonging. And then I think it is like Alessandra was talking about, I think it is an acknowledgement by the academic staff of some of the background characteristics of some of these students.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Absolutely.

Ben Walker  
Difficulty, the difficulty there is some of it is confidential, but I think Alessandra is absolutely right. Some of these are big societal factors, and I say to my advisors, you are not there to solve all society's problems, and you need to be kind to yourself, and you cannot solve all these issues, but what you can try and do through a coaching approach is show students you are aware of them, and you are trying to, together with them, overcome these different barriers for learning, and just one more thing, quickly. Sorry, I'll let someone else come in a minute, I'm talking for too long, but the last thing really is, in the UK, we've had a big change in the student body, and I'll be really interested to hear about Italy and the US as well, which is in the past, students lived on campus or near campus. They were like full-time students. They didn't get into as much debt as they do now. They had time to linger on campus and connect with others. Now lots of students commute long distances because of the financial situation. They live with their parents, and they are commuter students. Time is very tightly scheduled. They often are working to get some money alongside their studies that maybe in the past was not so common. And I think universities sometimes have been a little bit stuck in the past and thinking that the students are still how they were. It's completely changed, and through those induction and orientation activities we talked about, there needs to be acknowledgement of their actual lives as students these days, and what that means to foster belonging. So, a lot there, but I'll stop.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Thank you, Ben. And before I go to Chiara and Alessandra, I would like to respond to two things, and request you, if you could share that report you talked about the sense of belonging and all that, I think that would be very helpful to a lot of people, and I would also like to respond to the kind of students we have. We have a mixed bag, we have commuter students, students that are traveling one hour to come to college, 30 minutes, 45 minutes. We also have other students that live in the nearby apartments, you know, they live out there, they come to class, they go back, they cook for themselves, you know, they take care of business. And then we have a lot of students in the dorms, of course. We know that life is becoming very expensive for a lot of students, you know, the economy, the global economy, is affecting people in all sorts of, you know, in all sorts of the world, in all parts of the world, and, and, and life has become very expensive, things have become, education definitely has become very expensive, and talking about students, there's something that I possibly would have asked you to, or I would, I should have said, the kind of students we have, or the different populations we have in the US, you know, we have. Our students in the US are, you know, are from different categories. We have first generation students, we have international students, of course. We have students that are from low income families. We have students that are from the rural areas of the United States, you know, we have different types of students, and as we talk about it, these different types of students, each particular group has their own challenges, because we are talking about the first generation students, many of them come to college with having, having, you know almost zero knowledge about what they are getting into compared to a student that is coming from a family where both of the parents went to college or one parent went to college and then of course we have international students who are kind of universal because students that are international in nature, in the UK, and those that are in Italy, those that are in the US, are almost faced with the same challenges, you know, language, food, culture, all these things, and again, it's up to us as academic advisers to work with all of them, talking about professional development, then something that you brought up, and I was going to ask, and we can talk about it now, just for a few minutes. We cannot just sit in our offices without that professional development. Truly, it's so important whether you make a choice to research on different cultures based on the students that come to you. What kind of students are coming to your offices? Are they refugee students? Do you have knowledge about refugee students and the challenges they have faced before they came to the UK, before they came to Italy, before they came to the US? What are the challenges back home? You know what are the challenges facing students that are coming to our colleges and in our offices from the rural areas of the United States, what needs do they have? So, again, that professional development is so important, and it's going to help you as an academic advisor, as a faculty, be a better faculty, be a better academic adviser because you are aware of these issues and you're not just sitting there waiting for students to come who who you don't know the issues that touch them on a daily basis, so anyway, Kiara, would you like, please, to comment on what we've been talking about with them?

Chiara Bertolini  
Yes, at the Italy, Italian University, there are the recent Italian university isn't international university, and so we haven't these problems, but students in the time change are now students aren't similar to the past. Today, in the past, student, fewer people have had access to university education, and those who did were generally, generally full-time students. Now many more people have access to higher education, and this is a positive development, but many students now worked, so they haven't time to study, they haven't time to speak with other students, or to speak and to discuss with the professor, and now students have different needs than in the past, so we university have a new has new problems and try to respond a new question, a new student question with offer other offer materials, offer video. Lesson offer material and exercise to support students in our topic to study for about the degree, but now we haven't. Student in at university, students are at work, and we have to try a new way to communicate with the students and new way to support the students.

Margaret Mbindyo  
And what is that new way of communicating with the students? Chiara, how do you communicate with them?

Chiara Bertolini  
We have two ways we can speak about email with email, but we have a platform similar to Teams or other platforms, so students can take an appointment with tutor, sometimes tutors, or sometimes professor tutor, and so we can discuss and discuss with the words with the speak with in the same way today with us in platforms, so when I I'm at my home, and students is at his home, but you can talk.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Okay, is it like Zoom or Facebook, or is it like Zoom, or what kind is it?

Chiara Bertolini  
Yeah, like Teams, okay? Yes, or meet,

Margaret Mbindyo  
Okay? So that kind of technology. Do you ever use text messages?

Chiara Bertolini  
No, email, but not messages with the phone or other kind.

Margaret Mbindyo  
I see. I see. Alessandra, would you like to add a little bit before we move on?

Alessandra Landini  
Yeah, just lots of topics were faced there, so I would like just to add that I think that the most important difference among our countries, it is the historical, you know, scenario, because I think that for USA and UK the presence of the English language is very attractive for all over the world. Italy is very attractive for the cultural landscape and the cultural heritage, of course, but it is a matter of, I mean, very important aspect to the fact that they have to learn Italian, otherwise English language is a world language nowadays. The other aspect that I would like to share with you is my another little aspect. When I was a Fulbrighter in the USA, I've read, as you said before, there are several kinds of categories of students. Then I read a statistic about, for instance, homeless students in USA that 10 years ago we were 58,000 more or less, on the campuses nationwide in USA. So we don't have this kind of students, for instance, as Chiara said before, so and we don't have as well, so many international students like you, like you mentioned. Think about that. The first international students arrived in Italy in the 60s or 70s, because the Second World War destroyed everything and destroyed also the school scholastic system in Italy. So you have to think that we started again with a real difficulty after the Second World War in the 50s, you know, and then in the 60s and 70s from Africa, from, you know, from USA, from other countries in Europe, they started to arrive in Italy, but we have a lot of on the road students, lots of students that face the difficulties of poverty, because even if we have lots of public universities, and the reason this huge amount of money to pay to attend the universities, I mean, university is nowadays in Italy something that is connected with the, you know, the education that continues in the same generation, even if Alma Mater studio, I mean, in Bologna, is the ancient university in the Western countries, because it was founded in, in 1080 It Italy records the lower number of graduates compared to the OECD average, which is the 22% versus 42% average for the 2564 age group, so if you think about it, I think that the persistence of social barriers in Italy is still well founded.

Margaret Mbindyo  
That's, that's amazing. I just wish we had more time to, to talk more, but we're almost wrapping up. I would like to ask each one of you to possibly share one thing you wish our US colleagues here, you know, whether they are faculty or academic advisors, knew about students that come to the US as international students from your country. What would that be? Because we have a lot, even in my university here, we have students from the UK, we have students from Italy?

Alessandra Landini  
I think that if I can, I mean,

Margaret Mbindyo  
Yeah, go ahead.

Alessandra Landini  
I think that I would like that they will see them not only for the visa or for aspects, organizational aspects of their staying there, but welcome them as person with maybe a decolonized site, because even for Italian people, like for African people, there is a little bit of stereotypes around the world. So I would like that they were seen for their capabilities and their cultural attitudes.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Awesome, awesome. Ben?

Ben Walker  
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think it might be quite difficult to generalize, yeah, without becoming too stereotypical, but I guess what I see in British students are that there is quite a lot of work to do to get them to engage and interact. Now, will that be different in the US? I don't know, but you know, I, one might think, and again, it might be a cliche, or a bit of a stereotype, but one might think that in the US, there is a bit more confidence in speaking out publicly, in participating in class, in interaction, so I would say that the US universities need to be aware that the British student may be somewhat more reserved on that, and need to do more work in that, you know, just linking in with exactly everything that we've been saying about setting the conditions for belonging. One of the ways you set the conditions for belonging is and set the conditions for challenge, which is what we want. We want to challenge our students so that they do interact and maximize their learning and get them to think in new ways is the starting point for that is comfortable is to feel comfortable and so I would just say there might be more work to be done because they'll be in a strange country and then I think another key thing is when you're going to a different country, so this isn't just UK to US, but wherever you have a student who is at a university that isn't their home country, I think there's a job to be done to explain the language of that country's higher education system. So, you know, I'm minded of, you know, Bernstein in sociology talking about a restricted and elaborated code. Now, he links that to social class, and he talks about how, you know, the middle class and upper class, if you're born into those families, you are immediately privileged because you have a certain language, which, if you're working class or first in family, or maybe from a different country going to that university, you don't have that code, you have a maybe more restricted code. So I think there needs to be work done on getting up to speed those students in the language of higher education of that institution, and not use loads of acronyms that they might not know, because it might be specific to the US or specific to that university, or if you are going to use acronyms, for example, you make sure that you explain them, and then when I just one more thing to say briefly is, of course, with all these things, I think we need to, wherever the student comes from, we need to approach them with fresh eyes, so I think all the things we've said about background characteristics and data on the students is really important, but as advisors and as lecturers and as institutions, we need to strike a balance between being informed by that data and not letting us homogenize or profile students too much, and finding ways. One thing we do at Oxford Brookes University is we give - we created with our student partners fictional student personas who had lots of different background characteristics, nationality, race, disability, learning needs, etc. etc. And what we work with programs to do is say with this, with this student who is a fictional student, but they are taken from real examples. Is your program as inclusive as it needs to be, or would that person feel excluded? So I think it needs to be, we need to strike that balance, and the same way, in the same way we use data as well. Don't let data on a student and. Mean that you use it predictively, but use it to inform in a collaborative way conversations with students in a sensitive way, and you can do that through certain techniques of working, but through advisors in effective tutorials. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Awesome. Alessandra, did you want to say something?

Alessandra Landini  
Yeah, I just wanted to add, I mean, I totally agree with Ben. I really appreciate what he focuses, focused on. I would just add to that we have to be sure that we are building a community and smart connection among them. I mean, we need to organize events and promote social interaction as well, because some science students have to deal also with solitude when they are in another country, so helping them with social activities and support groups. I think, is key.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Absolutely, Kiara, your parting shot. 

Chiara Bertolini  
I agree with Alessandro and with Ben, I think it's very important, and Italian University has to work and to continue it, continue to change because it's important social dimension.

Margaret Mbindyo  
Listen, this has been a wonderful discussion. I just wish we had more time, you know. We have talked about very, very important issues that touch on our students, whether in the US, the UK, or even Italy, and I'm sure this discussion will be very impactful to people from all over the globe. Thank you so much for your time and your willingness to be on this podcast. And again, thank you so much, Matt, for this opportunity. Thank you, everybody.