by Joanne Irving-Walton
Universities are increasingly good at recording fragments of student experience. But fragments do not automatically make a whole. The work of connecting them remains stubbornly human.
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant —” Emily Dickinson advises.
It is an odd instruction for universities increasingly committed to straight lines: lines of accountability, lines between strategy and delivery, pathways through programmes, and data intended to show, cleanly and conclusively, what is happening. Yet neither learning nor universities behave quite like this. Students move between modules, systems, academic staff, professional services, regulations, placements and increasingly distributed forms of provision. Each part of the institution sees something. None necessarily sees the whole.
At the same time, we are becoming increasingly accomplished at recording these fragments. Attendance is captured. VLE activity can be traced. Marks, referrals, extensions and interventions leave institutional records. Processes generate evidence that something has happened. Reliable systems, fair regulations, consistent decisions and clear routes to support all matter. The problem begins when increasingly detailed representations of student experience are mistaken for increasingly complete understanding of it. A university can know a great deal about what a student has done while understanding remarkably little about what is happening.
Students experience the joins
Students rarely experience universities as organisational charts. They encounter them at the joins: between module and course, academic and pastoral support, partner and university, attendance and wellbeing, policy and circumstance, one team’s responsibility and another’s. This is where seemingly small difficulties can accumulate.
A student is sent the correct information but does not understand what they need to do next. A concern is referred, but nobody knows whether they reached the service. Marks are recorded module by module, while the pattern across them goes unnoticed. One part of the university knows about caring responsibilities; another sees only absence. Nothing necessarily fails. The failure sits in the joins — and those are rarely what institutions measure.
Each part of the institution may have done what it was required to do. The record contains multiple fragments of truth, carefully documented and separately owned. The student lives them all at once. That mismatch will be familiar to anyone who has ever sat with a student while several perfectly reasonable institutional answers fail to add up. But for those fragments to become a coherent experience, someone has to connect them.
Course leaders, personal tutors, module teams, administrators and support staff notice when several small things form a pattern. They translate formal language, recognise when an apparently straightforward case is not quite straightforward, contact another team rather than simply redirecting the student, remember context that is not visible in the current system, and follow up after the formal handover.
This kind of work has a substantial intellectual lineage. Strauss described the ‘articulation work’ required to coordinate complex activity, while Star and Strauss (1999) examined how work essential to keeping systems functioning can remain invisible to formal accounts of what work is. More recent higher education research has similarly drawn attention to boundary-crossing work and the expertise required to operate across institutional divisions (Vere, Verney and Webster-Deakin, 2024).
Pugh (2024) uses the term connective labour for the relational work through which people recognise, read and respond to one another in professions such as teaching and care. The work I am interested in here operates at a different level. It is the interpretive and relational work of connecting the fragments of an institution so that students experience something more coherent than a series of separate systems, teams and processes. I call this institutional connective labour: recognising which elements belong together, what context matters, where apparently routine cases require another look, and when completing a process has not resolved the problem that prompted it.
The work that disappears when it succeeds
Institutional connective labour is remarkably difficult for organisations to see, particularly in the large and distributed environments of higher education. Successful repair tends to leave little trace. An experienced member of staff spots a problem before it escalates, finds the colleague who knows how to resolve it, explains an opaque process, reconciles contradictory information or prevents an administrative delay from affecting progression. Eventually, the student continues. On paper, very little happened. Indeed, the successful outcome can make the system itself appear to have worked. This creates an uncomfortable organisational paradox. The people who are best at compensating for fragmented systems may inadvertently make that fragmentation less visible. Their judgement, memory, relationships and persistence absorb the gaps.
Workload models record formal roles more readily than the accumulation of noticing, translating, connecting and following through around them. Restructures may identify apparent duplication without asking whether overlapping roles are providing connection or resilience. Processes can be streamlined without recognising the informal knowledge through which they were previously made workable.
The visible machinery remains. The less visible capacity that made it function is weakened. As universities become more distributed across campuses, partners, professional services, digital environments and different forms of provision, fragmentation is not necessarily evidence of poor organisation. Complex institutions will always distribute responsibility. But distribution creates a corresponding need for integration. We tend to design carefully for the former and assume the latter will happen.
Greater resolution is not greater understanding
Data and process offer partial institutional views. An attendance pattern can signal a problem without explaining it. A referral records movement through a system without showing whether useful support was reached. A completed process can demonstrate compliance while the original difficulty remains unresolved.
Learning analytics scholars have long warned against treating data as neutral representations of student experience. Signals require interpretation, context and attention to student agency (Slade and Prinsloo, 2013). The same problem extends beyond analytics. Rules, records and processes are representations of reality, not reality itself. Their application still requires decisions about relevance, context and meaning. Informal systems can reproduce inequality, make support dependent on encountering the right person and leave both students and staff unprotected. But neither can the need for context and interpretation simply be designed out.
The difficulty becomes clearest when several individually reasonable accounts do not quite align. Low attendance may indicate disengagement, but it may mean something else entirely. A missed deadline may be habitual delay or the point at which an otherwise successful student can no longer absorb a series of pressures. A student may appear to have been referred successfully while moving repeatedly between services without ever finding somewhere their problem fits. Greater resolution does not necessarily produce greater understanding. Sometimes it simply gives us a more detailed picture of the fragments. The difficulty is not that any one account is false. It is that each tells the truth from only one angle.
Seeing slant
Dickinson’s ‘slant’ offers a useful way of thinking about this. Seeing slant is not an argument for indecision, endless consultation or gathering every possible perspective before acting. It is the recognition that complex experience rarely arrives from one direction. For universities, two questions can help expose the joins:
- What alternative stories could produce the pattern we can see?
- Where are staff repeatedly having to translate, reconnect or repair what a formal process has separated?
These are questions about judgement rather than additional process. The aim is not to collect every possible view before acting. Universities must simplify, classify and make decisions. But credible judgement requires some awareness of what has been simplified in doing so. The more useful institutional question may therefore be not simply whether a process has been completed, but what had to happen around that process to make it work.
The institution between the boxes
The point is not simply that this work should be recognised. It should tell us something. If staff repeatedly have to reconnect the same processes, translate the same information or recover context lost at the same handover, those interventions are evidence. They show where the formal account of how the institution works diverges from how it works in practice.
That makes institutional connective labour potentially diagnostic. A workaround may solve an immediate problem, but repeated workarounds reveal something more useful: where information stops travelling, where responsibilities do not quite meet, or where a process produces completion without resolution. That does not mean turning connective labour into another metric. Formalising it too heavily would risk flattening the very context and interpretation that make it useful. The point is to create ways for recurring patterns noticed through this work to inform institutional learning without reducing them to another dashboard. Nor should institutions depend on a few experienced individuals to hold the system together. The challenge is to make the conditions for noticing, connecting and escalating less accidental — and the knowledge generated through that work less private.
A practical starting point is to ask, in course reviews, service reviews or handover discussions: where are staff repeatedly having to reconnect what the formal process separates? Then take one recently ‘resolved’ case and ask a simpler question: what had to happen outside the formal process for this to reach a workable outcome? If the same kinds of repair appear repeatedly, that is not merely evidence of helpful staff. It is evidence about where the institution itself needs attention. For the student, the difference between a fragmented institution and a coherent one may simply be whether somebody noticed the joins.
Joanne Irving-Walton is a Principal Lecturer at Teesside University, working across learning and teaching and international partnerships. She is particularly interested in how academic judgement and professional identity develop through the emotional realities of higher education.
