UKAT, the United Kingdom Advising and Tutoring association, is a charitable trust and learned society representing scholars and practitioners of personal tutoring and academic advising in the UK higher education sector. Their mission is to advance effective personal tutoring and academic advising practice within higher education so that every student can experience inclusiveness, wellbeing, and personal growth, leading them to flourish and succeed. They seek to advance the field through their conferences, symposia, workshops, support for original research, peer-reviewed academic publications, accreditation of practice, professional courses, and resources.
Teesside University has recently renewed its UKAT Institutional Membership which enables our Institution to benefit from a wide variety of networking opportunities, and to collaborate and share practices that support student success with expert tutors and advisors across the sector. We hope that colleagues find this UKAT institutional membership to be a valuable resource and we would encourage all Teesside University staff to take full advantage of the member-exclusive courses, events and resources which UKAT provide.
One benefit of Institutional Membership is the Affiliate Membership category, and all TU staff can now register as a UKAT Affiliate Member free of charge. This will allow colleagues to gain direct access to all the member-only resources as well as publicly visible resources in the UKAT Resource Archive.
Affiliate Membership also enables colleagues to register as a member of any of the UKAT Special Interest Groups. Special Interest Groups are smaller communities within UKAT focused on specific student populations or specific aspects of personal tutoring practice. You are welcome to join any Special Interest Groups and you can view the current list of available groups on the Special Interest Groups page of the UKAT Website.
A recent addition to Institutional Membership is access to the UKAT Professional Development Curriculum, launched in January 2022. The Curriculum provides a range of scaffolded professional development opportunities for personal tutors and academic advisors which enable them to:
- Enhance their personal practice.
- Develop the confidence to perform their role effectively.
- Gain a deeper understanding of the theoretical bases for personal tutoring/academic advising.
- Engage with research evidence and the scholarship of the field.
The UKAT Professional Development Curriculum consists of professional learning activities in a variety of formats, including online learning activities and in-person workshops. The time required to engage with learning activities varies depending on the level and format of the activity. Online bite-size learning modules typically require less than an hour of learner engagement, whilst in-person workshops may vary between one and six hours in duration. By registering for free as a UKAT Affiliate Member any member of our staff can access a subset of UKAT’s online Professional Development Curriculum.
To register as an Affiliate Member please go to this link: https://www.ukat.ac.uk/join-ukat/affiliate-membership