Support for PhD students: the impact of institutional dynamics on the pedagogy of learning development

This paper explores one practitioner’s learning development work with PhD students in a changing university context in which managerialism and financial stringency have combined. It questions how learning development practitioners can maintain their professional goals while negotiating issues arising from managerialism, financial stringency, task-oriented budgeting and inter-professional co-operation. While learning development workers have traditionally espoused a broad, colleagual view of student learning and practice which looks beyond remediation, a cash-starved sector may look for simpler, task-oriented definitions in which work is discretely allocated to different professional groups rather than dealing with dynamic, complex and overlapping processes. Hence, two teaching strategies are explored: the use of pre-course learning development tutorials as a means to tackle timeliness and efficacy of courses, and learning development contributions to supervision development courses.