In this fascinating piece for ACUI’s Bulletin, the authors examine the notion of the college (student) union (building) as a “Third Place” In their recent article in the journal Leisure Sciences, Felice Yuen and Amanda Johnson reconsider Ray Oldenburg’s conceptualization of “third places.” Since Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place was published in 1999, the college union has […]
In this fascinating piece John Schless, CEO at Greenwich SU talks about how he set about demonstrating outcomes from the SU’s work as part of the strategic planning process. Joining Students’ Union, University of Greenwich (SU) in April 2016 I met a dedicated staff team that had worked hard over 4 years to grow participation […]
I am not advocating that all our decisions should be made in pugilistic exchanges of 2 minute speeches in a general meeting
When we started to run the modules, there was some disquiet that, as a Union, we were taking a dual role of both teaching students and representing them at the same time.
In this piece Neil Mackenzie, Head of Advice & Representation at Sheffield Students’ Union, argues that the automatic acceptance of ‘resilience’ as an agenda may work against students’ interests in the long term. Over the past few years we’ve all heard an emergent narrative about ‘Snowflakes’. The argument goes this generation- especially students, are so […]
In this piece Alan Roberts, Policy Development Manager at NUS gathers advice from SU staff around the UK on joining what some call “the student movement”. At the Annual Membership Services Conference for staff new to students’ unions we have a ‘welcome to the movement’ session before registration. To prep for this we asked colleagues […]