Student outreach work – why bother?
I have got a few things I want to catch up on – and you’ll be pleased to know it is not another Heated Rivalry post. It feels like I spent most of January asleep and most of February trying to wake up and catch up. I have not caught up, of course I haven’t. If I could actually catch up, that would suggest I don’t have a full time job… anyway. In the middle of my flu sickness absence, just as the coughing and snot production switched into crippling fatigue and stomach issues, I had a couple of days of almost coherence. Those two days coincided with the HELOA Conference I had agreed to go speak at with my absolutely brilliant colleague Jack Cooper. Here’s the blurb from the conference programme:
1.6: Working with academic colleagues to deliver effective outreach – Ballroom
Jack Cooper | Schools and Colleges Engagement Officer | Leeds Trinity University
Dr Jess Guth | Head of School of Business and Law | Leeds Trinity University
Engaging subject-level outreach is crucial to building meaningful relationships with schools and colleges and helping to breakdown barriers for students to access Higher Education. In this workshop, Jack Cooper, Schools and Colleges Engagement Officer and Dr Jess Guth, Head of School of Law from Leeds Trinity University will talk through their collaborative approach to designing and delivering high-impact subject outreach.
Honestly, I don’t really remember giving the talk that much. I remember struggling to breathe and being tired and struggling to hold onto thoughts. I also remember Jack being a really good presenter and setting the scene really well. In essence the argument was that Universities doing outreach work with Schools and Colleges is important for a variety of reasons – social justice, raising aspiration and widening access and participations and of course recruitment. I think I was the only academic in a room full of professional services staff. I think often running outreach sessions, travelling to schools and colleges or welcoming them to campus feels like another thing dumped on academics, another thing to do that doesn’t feel like it is really our job, something to be got out of. I have certainly worked with academics with attitudes like that over the course of my career. We argued that the relationships between the professional services team and academic staff is key to doing good, meaningful and effective outreach. We encouraged participants of the workshop to think about what they do, why, if it works, how it could be better and what maybe just needs to be stopped. It seemed to go well. It is also the only conference ever where, as a speaker, I received a thank you card.
Since the conference I have had cause to think more about outreach work for several reasons. One is that we are in the craziness of the student number planning cycle, workload planning and thinking about how many students we will have and when, where and how to teach them. Another is that I have recently received the outreach impact report from Jack’s team. As I have been working through spreadsheets my mind has been wandering off thinking about 2 different things in relation to outreach work: The first is a question about why I have never seen it as an add on. Even as a baby academic, I loved doing outreach sessions, I genuinely enjoyed going into Schools and Colleges, chatting to potential students, learning from their teachers. And I still do. But why? The second is about why we do this work and how we know if it works.
So first, why do I like this work? I think it is because I have never seen it as a recruitment activity as such. Of course that is usually how it is positioned for a university like mine. We need to be visible to the 17/18 year olds in our region. We need them to choose us. We are not a selective institution, we have to actively recruit. I understand that the outreach work is basically that. But to me it has always been the other stuff that matters more. I am a teacher at heart and outreach work is teaching. I have stood in so many classrooms in Keighley, Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham and surrounding areas and seen how the stories I can tell about my journey into Law or my friends’ journeys to university and beyond changes the perception of what is possible.
I taught a Law class at a local 6th Form in Keighley about a decade ago and was confronted by an angry young woman. She said ‘Why are you here? People like us don’t go to university. Go tick your boxes somewhere else’. I didn’t know what to say to her. I let her get in my face, I let her storm out. I said nothing when she came back in. I could have told her that I did my A-Levels in Keighley and I went to uni. Many of my friends grew up in some of the most deprived areas of Keighley, an already pretty poor town, and went to uni. I have told that story so many times and it always helps shift perspective. But somehow confronted with that anger, it didn’t seem right. It felt like I, we, had somehow got out and left a generation behind. We hadn’t made it better for those who came after us. It seems that the older I get, the more the ‘I sat where you are sitting now and look at me know’ narrative just feels smug and patronising. As I finished my session, I asked whether I could go sit with the angry young woman for a bit and ask her some questions. Of course her initial response was ‘Why do you care’. But she didn’t leave. In the end we talked for about 20 minutes. She wanted to be a lawyer but was already being told she needed to get that nonsense out of her head and go get a job. Finishing School was a luxury, going to university was outrageous. There was no money to support her, there was no understanding about what a university was, how it worked or what might be possible. I tried to explain, as best I could because I realised that explaining universities is hard – they’re weird! I can’t say that she was friendly but she was curious, she asked lots of questions. Then I left. I didn’t hear from her again. I don’t know what she is doing now but I do know that she went to a very prestigious university to study Law – her teacher told us. I think about her often. I hope that whatever she took from our conversation, she used it to help her get to where she wanted to be. She changed how I think about outreach work. It’s my opportunity to understand where today’s kids, tomorrow’s students, are in terms of their journeys, their understanding of what the future holds, their views on the world and their expectations of what comes next. She taught me to never assume anything and be prepared to abandon prepared sessions and activities and to focus on connection. Conversation is more important than content. Creating a space where the basics of degrees, universities, legal institutions and careers can be talked about without feeling embarrassed at not knowing and showing up in a way that makes clear that there are people out there, strangers at this point, who believe in them and are willing to take a chance on them are the most important things. I’m not there to persuade them to enrol with whatever university I happen to be working for – although I love seeing familiar faces arrive for welcome week – I am there to help them realise that the power to change their world is right there for them to grasp and if they let us in just a little bit, we will be right there with them.
Outreach work helps me design better transitions from College to Uni, it helps me create better teaching materials and use better examples, it helps me meet my students where they are and it makes me a better teacher. It also reminds me of my own privilege and the distance that can create and it reminds me that making the world a better place is our job and that while if often feels that way, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Even if it is just the one student encounter described above (and I think there are more), I am honoured to have been part of a little nudge that propelled her to jump into, what was for her and her family, a terrifying unknown, but one that had the potential to change her life. I hope it did.
I think in answering the first question, I have also answered the why we do it question. I guess I can’t speak for others but in summary, I do it because it changes the world for the better. Does it work? I don’t know. I know from the impact data that we have, that our outreach work generates applications for our courses. So for those who do it purely from a recruitment point of view – it seems to work. Does it change the world? Does it shift perspectives on what is possible? It often feels like it but actually I will never really know what impact I have. I like to think that sometimes I make a difference, that I am part of the spark that puts into focus that nothing is impossible and that whoever you thought you were, you deserve to go after your dreams. I don’t need data to tell me that I am helping to raise aspirations, creating the possibility to imagine a what if. And to be clear, I don’t care whether that what if is about becoming the next hot shot lawyer or rocket scientist or about living off grid and being self-sufficient or about finding your person and raising a huge family – or all of those things at different points in time. The power lies in the confidence to define your own what ifs. I know the power of being given the confidence and freedom to figure out my what if. I grew up in an environment where there was no real pressure to do well and no pressure at all to do anything specific, just lots of support for figuring out my dream and then living it. If I can be a tiny little bit of that for one or two kids I am lucky enough to cross paths with in those Schools and Colleges, then yeah, outreach work works.
Heated Rivalry: What if nobody knows you are their person?
I was going to stay away from writing more about Heated Rivalry. Let’s be honest, the internet – and social media in particular – is full of Heated Rivalry analysis. I haven’t properly read any of it. I have scanned some and some pops up on on my feeds and I note it as I scroll through. Some of it seems like good analysis raising interesting points, some of it seems completely unhinged and some if it so sort of dumb that I wondered whether the authors watched the series with the volume turned right down and their eyes closed. I don’t have the knowledge or skills to provide an academic analysis of the writing, the cinematography, the acting, the technical aspects… not my field. I also still don’t understand why the show has had such an emotional impact on me and why that impact lingers. That may be a therapy questions, I may just roll with it. I have watched Heated Rivalry a couple more times. I have read the books. I might at some point review the books as a whole – but then again, what would I say? They’re romance novels with some vaguely spicy sex scenes in them. So I probably won’t review them because actually romance novels aren’t generally my thing. I read the books because of the TV series. I preferred the TV series.
Anyway, there is one bit in the series that I wanted to explore further because it really hit me but it is also a scene where the reaction to it or experience of it seems to be very different for straight and queer people (using queer as a shorthand here because I prefer it to alphabet soup but you do you with labels). Or at leas that is what the online discourse suggests. I am talking about the scene where Shane gets knocked out cold on the ice and is taken to hospital and the hospital scene that follows. So for context, Shane and Ilya have, at this point been hooking up for years and their relationship is evolving and has become something more than just hook-ups – even if neither of them at this point know what that is or means or could be. But nobody knows. Not a single other person knows that they mean something to each other. From the comments online this seems to be the bit that hits so differently for queer people than it does for cishet people. I have seen lots of comments (the less unhinged ones) about how Ilya is obviously worried, how he has to wait until the morning to go see Shane in hospital, how sweet they are in the hospital scene… and all of that is true but I think for many of us who are queer, there is so much more there. Let me see if I can unpack this.
On the ice, before it is in any way clear how serious the injuries might be, my thoughts went straight to the realisation that if Shane dies (and the first time round watching, my brain was programmed that something terrible was going to happen – because it usually does to gay characters), then 2 things would happen – a huge part of Shane and who he was would be erased and Ilya would have to grieve alone without anyone ever knowing what he was to Shane and Shane to him. This big part of both of them would just cease to exist. Even if there was no death but maybe life changing injuries or injuries which would end Shane’s career, Ilya would no longer have access to Shane, everything changes. The Hockey world provides access to each other, trying to navigate their relationship outside of that context would be really difficult, particularly given their hyped up rivalry that means everyone assumes they hate each other. There would suddenly be gatekeepers and Ilya getting information about how Shane is, never mind getting to see him would seem really weird and impossible to navigate – it would likely force either coming out or retreat. Ilya needs to come up with a credible plan for the visit to the hospital. In a non closeted dating/hooking up scenario, he could just go and it wouldn’t be weird. In this case he has to assess whether others would see it as weird if he goes and is seen. He needs a justification for going that is not simply ‘I care about Shane’.
In the hospital scene, we see more than Ilya’s worry for Shane. I think we also see the pain of not being able to be there for Shane, to sit with him and hold his hand. We see the pain of not having been able to go to the hospital with him, to not be someone who might be called with updates – either directly or via family. It’s the pain of being treated as someone who is just on the periphery of Shane’s life, not central to it. While Shane clearly has Ilya at the forefront of his mind – concussion or not – the rest of the world doesn’t know and doesn’t really care and is in fact at best bemused by and at worst suspicious of Ilya’s hospital visit. The acting in these scenes is superb. The emotional depth breathtaking. Everything in the scenes suggests to me that the writers and actors were very aware if the implications of the relationship being a secret in this medical/injury context. It feels like Ilya carries the weight of how close they came to being erased from each others lives because he was the one who had to watch Shane being stretchered off, he was the one who didn’t get updates and couldn’t reach out to anyone for updates. He was the one who didn’t exist.
It feels like many straight people online missed the subtext of these scenes that had so many of us sobbing. So many of us know at least bits of that erasure. Being closeted doesn’t just mean sneaking around, it also means risking complete non-existence in the eyes of a world that doesn’t know what you mean to each other. It also entirely possible that I am just hyper aware of this narrative as we come up to the anniversary of my ex-girlfriend’s death. It’s 14 years since she died and we had not been together for a decade before her death but we were still really good friends (there’s a good lesbian stereotype for you). Just before she died she had started seeing someone new, I never got change to meet her but I wish I had. There were several former girlfriends at the funeral. I found the funeral really difficult. A couple of friends of hers/ours spoke or did a reading. The service was nice overall. But I didn’t recognise her in all the speeches and conversations. Because she never actually came out to her parents fully (they knew but preferred not to know), because some of our friends certainly took her being bisexual to mean she could just choose to be straight and should probably do that and because, while not closeted exactly, she kept her life compartmentalised, the stories that were told about her at her funeral were the stories that made her family feel comfortable. They didn’t include me or the 5 year relationship we had, they didn’t include the girlfriends that followed. They didn’t include this huge part of her. At the time I just remember keeping it together and justifying those choices because funerals are for those left behind, for the family… but we were left behind too and for a chunk of time, I was her family. We were important and central in her life too but those stories were erased, in the narrative of her life as it was told after her death, we did not exist. And it’s not that I’d forgotten that but it had become less important over time. And then I watched those scenes, and I remembered that feeling, felt that feeling.
I have other examples, far less serious ones, where even when we are out and open, the world can erase us. Sometimes it feels like being pushed back into a closet and being asked to be grateful that it is a walk-in closet rather than a tiny wardrobe. In 2008 I was in hospital with pancreatitis and Kath had to battle so hard to get information and be allowed to be with me. Now partly that was just crappy hospital processes and idiocy but partly it was also the fact that for one or two staff, including one consultant, positioning Kath as anything but my girlfriend was more comfortable. Even after he had been told our relationship status and I had given him an unfiltered mouthful (thanks pain meds), he still referred to Kath as my sister. We complained and got an apology from someone on his behalf but never from him. I always think I have been incredibly lucky to go through life with so little discrimination, hate and nonsense levelled at me but once I start thinking about it, I can give you a long list of micro- aggressions and attempts at erasing my reality for the comfort of others. While those things are annoying in every day life, when you experience them in a context that is more vulnerable like medical care, suddenly even little things can feel existential. What if I have to go to hospital for something, an emergency and the doctors refuse to give Kath updates about me? What if I am really struggling and they won’t allow her to see me. What if something happened to her and I have to deal with a homophobic arse before I can get to her? I don’t want to think about what that feels like when it is amplified by the fact that nobody knows. That for all the world, you have no business or right wanting to be with your person because nobody knows they are your person. Imagine being in a situation where nobody would call you, where information would not be released to you, where if you turned up, you might be sent away. I just can’t even. But I think we have to think about it. We have to get angry about this and channel that anger and talk about these things because things are not getting better for us. Things are getting worse. The closet is the only safe option for far too many and I hear a lot of stories about people having to retreat to that safety. I am not ok with that. I am not ok with any of it and I am acutely aware of the juxtaposition of a show like Heated Rivalry being on mainstream TV and streaming platforms across the world at the same time as queer lives feel very much under attack in so many places. I don’t know what that means but if elements of the show prompt me to share more of my experience and be open about it and try and explain what it feels like even in this incredibly privileged position, then maybe I can shine a tiny little light into the darkness while I figure out what I can actually do to make a difference.
Having Flu, The Spine Race, and Heated Rivalry
Not really a running or a work post so I didn’t know what to do with it. Just roll with it, I am.I have had a really weird week and a bit. I have been knocked out with flu so maybe my brain has just gone to mush. I have been trying to think about writing. I have been trying to think about work stuff. But I have been distracted by chaos in the world, by the scary geo-political shit we’re in the middle of. I have also been distracted by the state of Higher Education and legal education. I have been wondering about what the point is, or at least what my role in it can and should be. But my flu addled brain didn’t come up with much useful – it just got itself stuck in ‘we’re doomed’ mode. Anyway, two things happened at the same time – the Montane Winter Spine Race and the release of Heated Rivalry in the UK. I was not expecting to get drawn into either.
The Spine Race is a 268 mile run up the Pennine Way. There are also shorter options but they are all serious endurance races. I was always going to check in with the race because Kath’s coach Allie Bailey was doing the full Spine. And maybe it was just because I was ill and not actually capable of doing anything other than sit on the sofa, but I got seriously hooked on the dot watching and the social media updates of how everyone was doing. I was so anxious for everyone given the conditions. It was brutal, there was so much snow, it was icy, it was cold. I devoured the updates from those along the course and those who had to call it along the way. I was totally invested in the success of strangers. I internally cheered every checkpoint arrival, I refreshed the camera feeds to watch people arrive and leave. I worried about the front runners having gone off too fast – a worry that turned out not to be completely unfounded. I read the messages people where leaving for the athletes, I read anything I could find on social media and I celebrated the love all the runners seemed to have for each other, the mutual admiration, respect and support.
Each runner will have their why. You don’t attempt a race like that without a why. I didn’t at all care who won, I cared about the runners getting to run their race, to address their why. I felt a little stab of excitement every time a dot on the tracker moved forward. I was so glued to it. I was so gutted for people as they had to stop and retire. I always knew I would be interested in the race. I didn’t anticipate the emotional rollercoaster and obsessively checking dots on a map and Instagram reels for a week. Whenever I fell asleep (which was a lot), I would wake up and immediately refresh the dots. From Monday, Kath, who was working, got way more updates than she wanted. Watching the runners just put one foot in front of the other, just relentlessly moving forward somehow made me believe that anything is possible. That while the world is going to hell, humans continue to be resilient and brilliant and surprising and that maybe there is hope for something better. If people can do these extraordinary things in the face of all adversity then hope remains.
And then Heated Rivalry dropped. It is one of the most achingly beautiful, heartbreaking and in many ways gentle love stories I have ever seen or read. I am usually so late to popular culture success stories that it feels weird to have seen this as soon as it came out. It also feels weird to be so affected by it. I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting to be excited for a queer love story, for a queer story on mainstream TV, to enjoy the 6 episodes and move on. I did not expect for it to punch me in the gut and pull at my heartstrings hard and for me to spend the next week rewatching the series several times. Each time I noticed something I had missed before, every time it hit harder somehow. I cried more through this series than I have at anything for a long time (and I cry at everything) and the emotional impact is so intense, so visceral. And it annoys the hell out of me that I don’t really fully understand why.
I have read lots of commentary online as to why the show appeals to (straight) women and yes, I think the story speaks to me because of some of that. There is an absence of toxic masculinity in the way the relationships develop even if it all takes place in the aggressively masculine setting of hockey. There’s so much emotional availability, so little power play and at the same time so much anxiety, fear and uncertainty. It’s so unbelievably sweet and at the same time it’s totally heartbreaking. The acting is superb, the story telling perfect, the cinematography and soundtrack brilliant. It has some of the funniest lines in it and it has believable characters that I can’t help root for. From the first scene I wanted their happily ever after. I watched the first time through absolutely terrified that they wouldn’t get there. I was waiting for the nightmare moment, the horror story, the thing that somehow breaks the spell, the hope. I wanted a proper queer romance so much but I didn’t trust it. Not until I had seen it through and the happily ever after came. The second time round, I saw so much more in the way the characters and their relationship develops because my nervous system wasn’t on high alert. I wasn’t waiting for disaster to strike and the beautiful queer love story to be turned into a tragedy.
That made me think about the last (and I think only) time I was even remotely invested in fictional love story to the point that I would re-watch episodes obsessively: Willow and Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was important at the time because there weren’t really any lesbian love stories. It was one of the first times I saw something resembling a part of me in a TV show. That was 1999. I was at university. Everything was pretty relaxed, fun and fluid and it didn’t really matter whether I was referring to Tara and Willow as witches or as lesbians, same, same, but different. I think all of us in my little university bubble were just exploring, pushing boundaries and seeing where we ended up. In that world I was out even though I sort of didn’t need to be. But I also had a (on/off) girlfriend at the time – and she was not out. She was at a different university, she was sporty, she played on all the sports teams and while I think it has probably always been easier for queer women in sport, she struggled for a long time. When she eventually did come out at university, she got all the love. But she never came out to her parents and it was a really long time before we came out to our friends at home and the reception wasn’t awful but it also wasn’t accepting really. And I wanted my sunshine, I didn’t want to be a secret. And I was also absolutely terrified of what that actually meant – a bit like Ilya on the drive to the cottage. Watching Tara and Willow in Buffy, initially a secret, then not and then they killed Tara. It didn’t help. It confirmed something unspoken but something we sort of all knew. Queer love stories don’t have happy endings. There has to be something tragic, or queer characters aren’t allowed to stick around for too long. I cried over and over again because that meant that my own love stories were destined to secrecy or tragedy, one or the other (see also Brokeback Mountain).
There was Queer as Folk around the same time I think – which was fun and then a few years later I watched the L-Word. Maybe that should have been my world, the one I watched on repeat. I did have the DVD set but I was nowhere near as invested in that series as I am in Heated Rivalry and I don’t remember really relating to the stories, they didn’t get at the emotion in the same way. Heated Rivalry gives us the possibility of queer joy without the tragedy. All us queers finally get our happy ending. Or part of the happy ending, because the actual happy ending would be the safety to come out and just live our fucking lives. And I wonder whether that is why Episode 3 breaks me every time I watch it. Scott and Kip is the more grown up perspectives in some way. It’s the antidote to Shane and Ilya taking an age to admit to themselves that they are so deeply in love with each other. Scott is a little older, him and Kip are clearer about what they want and that they want to be together – and then boom, society, sport, heteronormative bullshit hits. The Art Gallery scene breaks my heart every time, as does Elena’s speech as she dances with Scott. I have sobbed through it several times. Sunshine, we all deserve sunshine and sunshine should not be terrifying, it should not come with risk. Sunshine should be joyous and celebratory and, well safe.
I saw someone write that Episodes 1 and 2 hook you, episodes 3 and 4 break you and episodes 5 and 6 heal you. Well, I think that’s pretty close. Although I think I was completely invested in the Shane/Ilya love story from the gym scene early on. The looks, the passing of the water bottle with the deliberate hand touch – haven’t we all been there. I mean, I haven’t for over 20 years because I found my person, but before that – the trying to figure out who is safe, who is on the same wavelength. The club scene in series 4 also resonated so much. Things I had just completely forgotten about. The pretence, the other people, the eye contact, the doubling down, fuck. And all because somehow pretending to be ‘normal’ was easier than just saying ‘yeah that’s my girl’. Somehow that seems absurd now. But that’s what happened so many times. And the end of episode 4 and start of 5 captures it so well and punches me right in the gut. We were in such a safe space really and I have never really thought about my coming out (which wasn’t one event) as in any way traumatic or difficult but somehow watching the Club scene in particular was a reminder that perhaps it wasn’t actually as easy as I now remember it. That the fear was real and powerful and that often secrecy felt safer. Pretence and the hurt we caused each other through that pretence still somehow felt better than being honest with our various joint groups of friends.
I guess you can’t talk about Heated Rivalry without talking about the sex. Although that in itself is bullshit really. The sex is no more explicit than sex scenes in other shows. The difference is that the sex is between men. And honestly, the sex is hot. I assumed it wouldn’t be (for me I mean), because, you know, men. Not really my thing and also, I’m like old enough to be their mother. But it is so much hotter than any hetero sex scene I have seen on TV. I’ve been thinking about that. Obviously, the people in the series that we see having sex are incredibly beautiful people, I can appreciate that whatever. But I think the sex scenes are also shot with such care. They centre desire, sure, but also tenderness and care. Consent is everywhere and then there is so much kissing. I think that stood out for me – so much kissing. Do I just tune out when watching sex in other series or films, or is the focus not on kissing or is it a kind of power thing in straight sex. I don’t know but I wonder whether ‘We didn’t even Kiss’ hits so hard because actually we see a lot of passionate but really tender kisses right from the start. The sex and maybe in particular the kisses show the evolution of the relationship – it’s communication. It’s sex for a reason in the show and I wonder whether so much straight sex on TV is kind of irrelevant to the story, it’s just there but doesn’t add much to the characters. Whereas here it’s key. You cannot tell this story without the sex.
There is so much more, there’s the women of the show (let’s take a minute for the Rose Landry’s (of any gender) of this world), there’s Scott Hunter’s coming out, the recognition of possibility that brings for Shane and particularly Ilya, there’s Kip’s dad and Shane’s parents. This week, the show has been everything.
So what am I taking away from watching dots on a map and Instagram updates of one of the most brutal endurance races in the world alongside several ‘reheats’ of Heated Rivalry?
- Humans are phenomenal and we never know what we can do until we dare try
- We all have our demons, we all face them in different ways
- I am an absolute sucker for a proper queer romance
- “Stupid Canadian Wolf Bird” is absolutely the best way to swear
- The word “Compatible” can do a lot of heavy lifting!
- And more seriously, representation, fucking matters. Queer stories matter. Somehow I saw more of me, felt more at home, in a show about queer male hockey players than I have ever seen or felt in a mainstream TV show, even one with the odd queer character. I can’t explain how or why, but that’s how it feels.
- We (I) needed this. The world is going to hell, anything not heteronormative feels under attack. It feels like we’re going backwards. Heated Rivalry is hope and I think that’s why I want to just watch it again and again. We need hope.
- The Spine Race being at the same time as me watching Heated Rivalry meant that there was something else to attach that hope to. It wasn’t just about fictional characters, I watched real humans achieve extraordinary things. That is also hope. Real hope that the world can change, because we can do things that seem impossible, that are terrifying. We can keep going with hope.
My Conversations 