Edinburgh Napier University

  The opportunity to socialise is reported by higher education students as one of the major motivations for attending and staying on campus. However, many students are excluded from the traditional extracurricular social opportunities because of the demands of part-time work, family commitments or home living. This paper reports on the experiences of teaching staff from Edinburgh Napier’s School of Applied Science, in the use of practical classes to promote social interaction amongst peers and to erode barriers between teachers and learners. A recent survey of biology students at Edinburgh Napier University (ENU) has shown that 95% of participants were most likely to attend practical classes in comparison to other learning activities such as lectures (80%). Practical classes offer learners the opportunity to meet, collaborate and befriend their peers in a structured task focus manner that is often less intimidating and more inclusive than organised social events. Moreover, teachers have the chance to meet students on an informal one-to-one basis and can engineer social
interaction amongst peers through group work. In 2023, fresher students joining the Biological Science programme at ENU took part in five weekly laboratory-based induction events, which started on the second day of the new trimester. In the first session, students were assigned to groups on the basis of their common personal development tutors (PDT) and were asked to collaborate in the design and execution of a simple laboratory task. Midway through the task, PDTs joined their groups to introduce themselves and to promote
understanding of the assigned task. In subsequent sessions, students were asked to collaborate with their groups to analyse the results they obtained in laboratory tasks. Module evaluation and attendance data were used to evaluate this intervention, compared with previous cohorts