IMPROVING PARTICIPATION IN THE CLASSROOM

Spanish students participating in exchange programs point out the difficulty of participating in classrooms debates and realize that they are less able to engage in discussions in comparison to their European counterparts. This is due to historical and cultural reasons.

In this paper, we explain and analyze the experience carried out at Universitat Pompeu Fabra by which students from business and economics degrees were encouraged to participate in a Highly-Participative Process used as a specific training in participation skills.
A highly-participative process is commonly used to collect information on a specific subject from a number of participants during a short period of time. There is a basic formal structure but most of the time available is left for discussion amongst the participants.
The topic chosen for the participation process was the figure of the “University Tutor” to be implemented at Spanish universities, following the EHEA requirements.
Therefore the experience had a double objective:
a) Train students in participation.
b) Obtain information about their opinion of the University Tutor.