Law School Staff and Communications - Keele University

Staff Communications

Who we are and how we communicate with you

1: Lecturers / Seminar Tutors

University lecturers are not like teachers at school. Teaching is only one aspect of a lecturer's job. S/he is also expected to do research for about half their time, and will often do this from their home office rather than in the Law School. There is also a lot of administrative work to do: marking papers, seeing students, attending meetings, marketing courses, producing course materials, and attending conferences. Academic Schools generally manage their own affairs. This means that lecturers make most of the decisions about the way in which a School is run, although things like timetabling of lectures, admissions, examinations and academic appeals are handled centrally. This devolved management means that a great deal of academics' time is spent administrating the School. S/he will also teach a great many students and frequently several different subjects.

For this reason, you cannot expect to see your lecturers or seminar leaders whenever you want to. You will usually have to wait until their advertised office hours (posted on their door) or make a special appointment (email is usually best). You can find staff email addresses on the Law School web pages.

Email is the best way to contact staff although they cannot be expected to respond instantaneously. Staff endeavour to respond to queries within a reasonable time period. However, most information about your module can be found on the module webpages on the KLE (Keele Learning Environment), in the module outline, in the recommended reading or the module materials pack, so please check these sources first as the answer to your query may be there!

2: Your Personal Tutor

Much of the available Law School support for students centres around our Personal Tutor system. Every student is assigned a Personal Tutor for the duration of their degree, though the tutor may change if staff are on research sabbatical.

  • Your Personal Tutor is there to help you deal with any academic, health or personal problems that you might have. It is your responsibility to ensure that you go to your Personal Tutor whenever you need help or are asked to go to see them.
  • You MUST meet with your Personal Tutor during the Welcome Week. When you enrol on Saturday 22th August you will receive details of who your Personal Tutor is and where you can find him or her.
  • Subsequently, you should meet with your Personal Tutor again in weeks 3-4 so that you can discuss how you have settled into your studies. You should meet again at the end of semester 1 or when you have your results from semester 1, and then again towards the end of semester 2 to reflect on your progress in Level 1 and discuss any issues to do with Level 2.
  • Your Personal Tutor will have office hours set aside for seeing students. Come along during this time if you want to see them or email them for an appointment.
  • You should go to your Personal Tutor if you need help with study skills, wish to review and reflect on your progress, if you need feedback on assessed work and examination results, help understanding feedback given by other staff members, or need guidance in making choices over modules, options, postgraduate/further study and career opportunities.
  • You should also go to your Personal Tutor if you are having personal problems or any other difficulties such as poor health. Your Personal Tutor will be able to direct you to appropriate colleagues within the School, or to a central Keele service such as the Student Support and Development Services, the Counselling Service, Health Centre, the Students' Union or the Independent Advice Unit.
  • Everything that you discuss with your Personal Tutor is confidential and your Tutor will ask your permission if it is necessary to discuss your difficulties with others.  Confidentiality will only usually be breached without your consent if there is good reason to believe that there is a risk to yourself or someone else.
  • Your personal tutor is the member of staff who you should approach for any references that you may need.
  • The Guidance and Code of practice for Personal Tutoring can be found here.

3: The Senior Tutor

The Senior Tutor oversees the Personal Tutor system, providing advice and guidance to Personal Tutors on their role. As a student, you will not usually have much contact with the Senior Tutor. Eliza Varney is the Senior Tutor for Law.

4: The Year Tutor

This is the person you will need to see if you require an extension on an essay submission deadline. Only your Year Tutor can grant an extension. Therefore, there is absolutely no point asking any other member of staff. The Year 1 Tutor for Semester 1 2012/13 is Fiona Cownie and for Semester 2 2012/13 is John Danaher.

5: Support Staff

There are several support staff, most of whom are based in the Law School General Office. There is a separate office for postgraduate students.

As stated above in relation to academic staff, please ensure that you try and find out the information you seek from other sources before emailing office staff or going to the office. You can easily find most information for yourself; only approach office staff if you have exhausted the sources listed in section 8 below.

6: How we communicate with you

By email.

Check your Keele email regularly. This is extremely important. You can access your Keele email through the webmail system. This means that you can open your Keele account whether you’re in Hampstead or Honolulu! So there’s never any excuse to be out of touch with the Law School.

You must use your Keele account, not a personal account. The University is keen that you do not clog up the system with hotmail, yahoo, and similar accounts. Such accounts lead to problems with spam and viruses that threaten the whole Keele system. Most staff will not respond to anything apart from a Keele address, so please use your Keele email to communicate with us.

It is also far more professional to use your academic account rather than addresses such as veryembarrasingemailaddress@yahmail.com or IwishIhadneverchosenthisname@sillymail.co.uk

Through the Keele Learning Environment

All Level 1 Law modules make use of Keele’s Virtual learning Environment (KLE).

Announcements will be made through the KLE. You should regularly use the KLE for information, lecture slides and seminar materials. There is a Law Student Noticeboard on the KLE where you can find, amongst other things, the student handbook.

Law School whiteboard

Urgent messages are put on the whiteboard in the School.

Year noticeboard

Make sure you regularly look at your year’s noticeboard in the School.

By post

Make sure that Student and Course Information in the Tawney Building have your correct home and term-time addresses. Important letters concerning examination results, progression, etc. are sent out centrally by the Academic Services Directorate (ASD), not by the Law School.

If your address or contact details change at any point during your studies, please follow the procedures detailed on the Student and Course Information (SCI) webpages.

7: Contacting Staff

There will frequently be times when you feel confused by texts that you are reading or seminar discussion questions that you are exploring. At times like these, it’s easy to email a tutor or knock on their door and ask for all to be made clear. However, there are a numbers of reasons why this is neither possible nor desirable. Do read on and discover some points to bear in mind when you’re feeling bamboozled!

i. Law is an inherently difficult subject

Understanding and critiquing law is difficult whether you’re an undergraduate student, a postgraduate researcher or a Professor. Everyone in the School is “studying” law in some respect and this is an ongoing process, regardless of the stage that your academic career is at. The legal, political, social and philosophical issues which you will confront as a law student are inescapably intricate and demanding, and the reason why academics, judges, cultural theorists and sociologists argue and debate over the very issues that you will be exploring, is because these debates cannot be resolved and actually get more difficult and layered as time goes on. A good motto to adopt is always to try to be ‘comfortable with complexity’. You need to familiarise yourself with the legal issues, the relevant cases and statutes, and the complex academic and juridical debates, ensuring that you have an opinion on these debates that you can substantiate with evidence. But you should not expect to be able to have a simple, clear or linear understanding of a legal topic, or to find the “right” answers (there aren’t any). Being comfortable with complexity and a certain degree of confusion is just part and parcel of being an academic and understanding the challenging society that we inhabit.

However, the School does recognise that there will be occasions when you are having genuine difficulty despite having attended all lectures and tutorials and devoured all the relevant module materials and texts. Building on the general observations above about university lecturers and the nature of their job, in order to get the most out of the School’s staff there are certain things you should do before you contact the lecturer/seminar leader concerned.

ii. Consult the module’s course materials

Please consult the relevant course materials (either web based on the KLE or hard-copied) to try to achieve a better understanding of difficult areas of law and how they fit together. Law’s teaching staff take the preparation of their course materials very seriously, spending a great deal of time selecting and producing the materials and seeking to make them as helpful and informative as possible. The materials are not just meant for consultation in formal teaching time but should constantly accompany your thinking and reading in the module. When they are read carefully and as part of your private study time, the course packs are likely to provide you with a greater understanding of matters you are finding difficult. You should know your course materials inside out as they are key to understanding each module. Course materials will also frequently direct you to central reading in the form of leading books and articles. These should be your next port of call.

iii. Ensure you complete any recommended reading.

Please make sure you undertake any reading that has been set. Such reading is selected in order to operate in conjunction with course materials and teaching. You should ensure that you do any such reading before you contact the member of staff concerned. Given the nature of University education, you should also endeavour to locate and read additional text sources to try to understand things for yourself. The more different sources of information that you consult, the more likely it is that things will “click” into place.

iv. Preparing for contact with staff

If you are still unsure of something, then it is important that you are able to clarify matters, and at this stage you should consider contacting your lecturer or seminar leader. In order for the member of staff concerned to be most helpful to you, please ensure you are in a position to tell her/him exactly what it is you find difficult rather than asking them for unspecific help.

To do this, you must have done some preparation with the course materials and recommended texts. This will help the module tutor to identify more precisely the nature of your difficulty, and help to remedy it. It is not helpful for you to expect staff to give you lengthy ‘all I know about …’ accounts of areas of law: this is not possible given the time constraints we are all subject to. More importantly, such expectations are not productive as learning is not a passive process that can be passed to you by a lecturer - it is an active and personal journey. In addition to this, being more informed about your query will greatly help your understanding of the issues as trying to focus on precisely what it is that you are finding hard to understand, can give you a new perspective on your difficulties and will help you to appreciate what you do understand as well as what you don’t.

v. Contacting your seminar leader or lecturer

The more general points above should leave you in no doubt that it is generally not possible or desirable for you to see your lecturers or tutors whenever you wish to. Academic staff have dedicated office hours when they are available exclusively for you and are not immersed in anything else. Therefore, office hours are an obvious time for you to come and see your lecturer and sit down and discuss any such difficulties you are experiencing. In addition to this, because members of staff teach a number of courses and not just the one you are interested in, it might also be a good idea to email the person concerned in advance and indicate what it is you are likely to be asking them. This gives them a chance to refresh their understanding of the issue.

Outside their designated office hours, you should contact staff by email, unless the member of staff concerned has indicated otherwise. Staff email addresses are available on the law school website. Members of staff check their email frequently (as should you), and you will probably find that most staff are happy to provide actual help via email, providing you are able to be sufficiently clear about the work you have done, and about what you are finding difficult. However, also as indicated above, staff cannot be expected to respond to your queries instantaneously, and will undertake to respond to emails received within a reasonable time.

While the stages above may be fairly obvious responses to difficulties with work, the reason why they are being outlined here is because colleagues in the School are often approached by students who claim to have problems understanding a topic, but who have not even bothered to do the recommended reading or read the course materials in the first place! This is not an appropriate and acceptable response to difficulties: understanding requires effort and perseverance.

Many of you will do the things outlined above as a matter of course, and will appreciate this helpful guidance on how to get the most out of the Law School’s staff. But for those of you who are used to the more regimented and controlled nature of high school, it is crucial that you nurture your ability to be your own boss, motivate yourself and think and work independently as soon as possible, otherwise you will find it extremely hard to succeed at University on an educational or a personal level.

8: Sources of information

Information on a law module:

  • Module webpages on the KLE
  • The module study pack

Something in the module you don’t understand:

  • Module webpages on the KLE
  • The module study pack
  • Your lecture/ tutorial notes
  • The recommended texts
  • Wider reading

Information on seminars:

  • School noticeboards
  • The module webpages
  • The module study pack

Can’t work out the meaning of a specific word or abbreviation:

Using electronic resources:

How we mark your work and calculate your degree:

I'm having difficulty using the KLE:

  • Questions on the content of course sections should be referred directly to your module leader.
  • For non-module issues, please consult the IT student services
  • If the student pages don't help you with your query, please contact the Help Desk on ext. 33636 or by email, itservice@keele.ac.uk

I need an essay extension:

  • Read the regulations in the law student handbook
  • Then approach your Year Tutor
  • ONLY they can grant you an extension

When and where lectures are:

  • See the online timetable - rooms and times may change so please view regularly

When exams are:

I want to join a law student society or contact one:

  • Please don’t email academic or office staff.
  • Check the student society noticeboard in the School
  • Have a look at the student societies on the KUSU pages

I’m off campus. What are the passwords?

  • To access the VLE, use your Keele username and password.
  • To access other Keele resources:

The library is working towards introducing a "single sign-on" technology to improve access to our subscribed e-resources. In practical terms this will mean that users will be able to access online resources by entering their Keele username and password rather than a separate ATHENS username and password. http://www.keele.ac.uk/library/support/access/

Who is my personal tutor? Who is my seminar leader?

  • See the year noticeboards, information given to you when registering, or ask in the main office

What’s Professor Blogg’s email address? Where’s Professor Blogg’s room?

Careers advice?