It takes just one person to start the motion of change. Feedback is the fuel that drives change, and the more students who contribute their insights and perspectives, the more powerful the resulting transformation will be.
Section 38 of the University of the Arts Helsinki Education Regulations states that “Assessment data and feedback concerning education and teaching are gathered systematically”which means that the university must have systems in place for students to report issues. How much impact these channels have on the university’s life is dependent on whether the students use these channels. If the problems are not being reported by the students using the official channels, it is likely the university will not become aware of the issues.
Being aware and using the feedback forms is something every student can and should do to make it possible for the university to respond and develop their systems to prevent such problems in the future. Reporting your problems using the official channels will likely not take any longer than venting to your friend or posting about it on social media. Additionally, it is important to communicate also about the problems that you were able to solve in the end, but should not have been that difficult to deal with in the first place. Only through starting to give more feedback using the proper channels will we lower the threshold and normalise a healthy discussion between the students and the university about our study environment.
What are the channels you should use for feedback?
- A general feedback form is now available on the feedback page of opiskelija.uniarts.fi. that can be used to report about anything related to buildings and processes to inappropriate behaviour.
- Course feedback is given in Tuudo and reminders get sent to the students’ uniarts email.
- Problems with booking and other services in Peppi can be reported directly in Peppi using their own feedback form.
- In addition, the university gets feedback through the Student Unions appointed student representatives in steering, development and recruitment groups. You can also approach the representatives.
- University collects statistical information also through nationally requested Finnish Bachelor's Graduate Survey filled out before getting one’s diploma.
- When unsure how to address a problem you come across, you can always ask the Student Union or for example your head of department for advice on how to deal with it.
As an example of students’ lives getting better after giving feedback, when more and more activities related to orchestra started to be scheduled for weekends and outside of teaching periods because then students do not have other courses running (e.g. during the weeks 42 and 8 which are meant to be break/independent work weeks), the unhappy students whose last little moments for rest were slipping away, approached the orchestra student board (where all instrument groups are represented by at least one student) and an agreement was reached that going forward orchestral activities will not be scheduled outside of teaching periods and Sundays will only be a last resort when a project’s concert can not be scheduled on a different day due to hall availabilities. Had the students not addressed the issue formally, the unacknowledged conflict over scheduling would likely have continued to fester, leading to further issues between the orchestra office and the students.
By providing feedback and reaching an agreement, the students were able to successfully advocate for their own needs and those of future students by getting the orchestra office to take the first step towards respecting students’ weekends, rest, and well-being in the scheduling of orchestra activities.
Building a healthy university community where constructive feedback and development discussions are a norm is a joint responsibility of the university and the students. Improving feedback forms and the usage of them is an important step, especially when it comes to problems not related directly to a certain course (such as campuses, systems and processes), but not enough to tackle the culture of self-censorship and fear of harming one’s own or their teacher’s career in regards to speaking about questionable or wrongful behaviour in teaching situations, in particular when it comes to one-to-one teaching. As these teacher-student relationships are very personal, dealing with individual artistic questions, addressing any problems when the student feels they can not talk about it directly to their teacher can lead to stagnation in their studies. For this reason well-established and recognised routes for asking advice confidentially about dealing with these issues with one’s teacher need to be developed as well.
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