Waypoint: Charting New Paths in Personal Tutoring/Academic Advising Scholarship - Adventures in Advising

What happens when advising professionals reimagine scholarship—not as something locked behind paywalls and jargon, but as a living, collaborative practice? In this episode of Adventures in Advising, hosts Matt and Ryan sit down with Dr. David Grey (UKAT) and Oscar van den Wijngaard (Maastricht University) to discuss Waypoint, a new open-access journal dedicated to student advising practice and research across Europe.

From redefining what “scholarly” means to creating a more inclusive, dialogue-driven peer review process, Oscar and David share how Waypoint is breaking barriers and building bridges between theory and practice. Whether you’re an advisor, researcher, or simply curious about how ideas become action in higher education, this conversation will inspire you to find your own waypoint in the evolving landscape of academic advising.

Check out the inaugural edition of Waypoint!

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Transcript

Ryan Scheckel  
All right, welcome everybody to another episode of adventures and advising. My name is Ryan shekel and and with us, as always, is Matt Markin, Matt, how are you doing today?

Matt Markin  
Doing very well, and always excited for episodes, but especially this one, because, you know, we were both at the UKAT conference back in April, and had a fantastic time and always got to, you know, have a good time chatting with our guests today.

Ryan Scheckel  
One of the things that I want to share for this recording is I'm on the road. If any of our video watchers will notice my background is different. I was in Houston for a couple different events, and the hotel I'm staying in zoom renovations this morning. So if you catch any noise along the way, bear with us. We appreciate your patience and sticking with us. You know, we we always have an opportunity to stop and think about new things, things that are changing, things that are different, to be reflective about those things and and today, we have Oscar and David, who've been on the podcast before. Definitely, if you haven't listened to those episodes, go back and find them in our back. Find them in our back catalog. But gentlemen, we want to give you a chance to sort of catch us up on what's happening with you, Oscar. Oscar has been a couple years since you're on the podcast, but David was on not too long ago, sort of recapping the UKAT 10th anniversary and stuff. So I'm going to start with Oscar, since we have maybe more to catch up on what's what's new in your life, what's going on professionally, and stuff that you want to share with our advising community. 

Oscar van den Wijngaard  
Hello to Matt as well. It's really nice to be here to do this again. Indeed, it's been a long time. Was really nice seeing you both in London earlier this year, but I think there's too much to catch up with. So I think a highlight professionally is that with with a with a small team of people in Maastricht, we've been working very hard. So I'm in Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and we've been working really hard on getting sort of a large group of people in different roles together to talk about what our shared vision for advising at our institution is, and which culminated into an actual vision and many, many plans also in progress currently on making that vision more than just a piece of paper so that we the work continues, but it's been really nice, and one of the things I really like about it is that, first of all that so many people were involved. As I said, it was a small team getting the ball rolling and keeping it sort of going forward, but many people were involved. So I really feel that the vision is not just something that sort of came out of a few people and because nothing got in the way, all of a sudden, became the institutional vision. But really many people were involved, and I like the fact that it has strong elements in it that look at advising as a learning process, which generally, I think is really nice, and it also really suits our university. We talk a lot about teaching and learning at our university. We have a sort of a problem based approach in all of our learning. And people like to talk about education, which may not always be the case, but at everywhere, but we do. And I really like the fact that the way we, yeah, we we brought advising into that conversation about teaching and learning sort of seemed to have worked out so well. And there's still a lot that needs to be done, obviously, but, yeah, that was really a highlight, sort of the outcome, but also definitely the whole process, working with so many people, also seeing that much more than expected. I guess, sort of many people actually seem to agree on what they valued about advising. So that was also really nice. We thought, oh, maybe we'll have to convince many of our colleagues in all the roles that are there of this. You know the old the old slogan advising is teaching, sort of never lost any of its value to us, even though we may rephrase it now a little and rephrase it differently, but, but that so many people thought about it the same way, it was also very uplifting. So that was a very positive thing, a challenge, although one that may sometimes also help us, because it's all about showing what the very thing that you do contributes to the overall success of students in institutions. But the context of the institution has definitely changed with with a with political changes that happened in the Netherlands, currently, not everyone seems to want to prioritize higher education when it comes to government spending as much as we would like it. Sort of would like to see it still a little bit, sort of a way. The the actual impact of that, but we also, in a way, and it's and it's true, we see it as an opportunity and also as an incentive for us in advising to say, okay, then what's what makes us so, so critically important that we would like to expand on it, rather than be the first ones which, which may very well be the case where sort of that received the blow of budget cuts. So that's the short of it, much more to talk about, but, and it wasn't even really short. Sorry.

Ryan Scheckel  
No, no need for apologies. You know, it's like I said in the beginning, the opportunity to stop and be reflective about the work that we do, but also the way that our work contributes to these bigger questions of institutional mission and effectiveness, and then in a sort of national and global community and in society sense too. Sometimes those are really big pictures, and it's hard to find our place in them. But it's always good to stop and take a look when we're able to and when maybe it is possibly the best survival strategy. So David, we talked a little bit. What's new with you in the last few months?

David Grey  
Hi Ryan, good to see you again. And Matt, good to see you too. Great to have you both with us at the conference back in April. What's new in a few months? Well, a few months isn't very long, really. It's amazing how quickly a few months passes by. I guess for us, the sort of the higher education sector in the UK is kind of struggling from the things that Oscar was talking about. We have quite a significant financial crisis here in higher education in the UK, we're seeing lots of universities very constrained for their finances, lots of cutbacks in terms of staff. So I think nationally, we've lost about five to 10% of the teaching staff in the UK, and it's all sectors of staff. So it's just making it harder for universities to operate. We're starting to see things like universities merge. So the operating environment that we're working in is kind of changing, but I'm really pleased to say that UKAT is going from strength to strength. We're continuing to grow our institutional member base, so most of our members gain their membership through their institution. So that's growing. The institutions are still seeing real value in advising, which is great. That's fantastic, and we're seeing more of them engaging with a scheme that we've had. We've had it in pilot for about a year now it's an institutional accreditation scheme. So we've had schemes to accredit individual advisors and their experience for five or six years now, and then we've moved into this one to accredit the experience of whole institutions. So yeah, I'm delighted to say that we've got more and more institutions joining that pilot, and it's rapidly not becoming a pilot and becoming the real thing. So that's great. It's a it's a good problem to have. And I guess the other thing that's new because you both joined us in in in London for the conference last April. Shameless plug, we have another conference coming up. So these things come around with alarming regularity. And the next one is in Manchester next April, focused on student futures. So we'd love to see both of you and as many of your listeners as possible. That would be fantastic to have you all join us.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, and if anyone wants to submit a proposal, I think the deadline, they still have time to submit something, right?

David Grey  
They do. Matt, yes, I think that I'm going from memory here. I think the deadline is the 12th of December. It's certainly in December anyway, so there's plenty of time to submit.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, absolutely. And then for the both of you, there's something called waypoint. And waypoints, a new online, open access journal hosted by UKAT, focused on student advising, practice and research in Europe, at least what I see on the website. So for the both of you, what prompted the creation of this and why now? 

David Grey  
Well, there's a good question. I think maybe the best place to start is with a bit of history, actually, Matt, so UKAT has a mission to enhance advising practice in higher education. And way back in 2017 at the time, UKAT was really thinking about ways it could do that and ways it could increase engagement with scholarship. We knew that there was very little research happening in the UK, so we were keen to try and increase the research capacity around advising in the UK. And we thought, why don't we create a journal? So the idea of creating a journal happened way back then, but at the time, I think we thought about it long and hard and realized how much effort there is in actually bringing a journal to life. And we realized it maybe wasn't the right time to do that. So as some of your listeners may remember, and certainly as Oscar remembers, because Oscar and I were both involved in this, we actually did a special edition of the frontiers in education journal. It was a collaborative, international affair, and there were about five of us on the editing panel. We had some great articles in that, and we moved on from that in our thinking, and our thinking has changed a little around the notion of scholarship, and Oscar might say a little bit more about. At in a moment. But rather than thinking about it in terms of increasing research capacity, we were thinking about something that brings together scholarship and brings that closer to practice. And it just seemed that as our thinking had moved on and other things had changed, our capacity as an organization has changed. We now have some more staff. We had some more resource available that we didn't have back then. We figured it was a good time to revisit this notion of creating a journal, and we wanted to do something that really supported advisors in Europe, that focused on advisors in Europe, and we've worked very closely with with lvsr, the Dutch Advising Association that Oscar is associated with. So it was just a natural thing for us to try and do, to work together, to try and bring something to life that would benefit advisors in Europe.

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, Oscar, do you want to know in the sense of that you have a past in publication with a focus on the interplay between scholarship, theory and practice, the concept of praxis and and I wonder if you could just expand a little bit more, especially for those of us who when we think about scholarship, we think about the large capital R research format, peer review and those sorts of double blinded studies models. So a little bit of your background in the Praxis space, but also the why, why that matters philosophically and professionally as you approach building a new publication. 

Oscar van den Wijngaard  
There's actually maybe two ways of looking at it that come from different angles, but then meet somewhere, and one is, and we have definitely in with various people, including you guys, talked about this before, but, and it's getting an old perspective, but still very relevant, I think, is that if the work of Ernest Boyer about scholarship. I think that's that's really departing from the traditional notion of research and scholarship, asking the question, haven't we? And I mean, this question was asked by Boyer and the people who work with, I think, over 90 years ago now, or roughly. But have we? Did we end up defining research into narrow a fashion. And his his answer to that question was yes, and, and, but more so he said, we should revisit scholarship, as he said, so this emphasis on research as a as a rather potentially isolated, and that's exaggerating it, I know, but sort of isolated process of of data, gathering one way or other sort of analyzing that and then publishing about it that that felt as if it wasn't even doing justice to more, maybe classical notions of what scholarship could be about. So Boyer said, in addition to this, this very vital process of discovering and generating new knowledge. There are other aspects as well, and one of them is that scholars, scholar researchers, should concern themselves with the question of what else then said, If satisfying our intellectual curiosity, does this new knowledge do for us? How can it be applied and also, how can it be shared with those who are not member of that small community that's sort of with me doing research on this, but who might still be interested or who might benefit. So two important notions that he brought, I would say, back into scholarship, were those of application and of teaching. So that's that's one thing that when I came across that idea being fairly active in the world of teaching and advising, sort of somehow sort of stuck with me. The other angle, I think, is what you hear when you go to, for instance, go to conferences like the Nakata conferences or the UCAT conferences, or one constant set of conference that's taking place annually, also in Europe that I find it incredibly interesting is the first is the European First Year Experience Conference, which clearly is about the First Year Experience, but in a very holistic way, so not tied to roles, but to that phenomenon of the First Year. But you you encounter a lot of people, many of whom are not researchers, per se or by trade, but who approach what they're doing in a way that is very systematic, where they use frameworks, sometimes theory, sometimes just frameworks based on experience, but things that can be consistently applied to what they do that help them understand new phenomena and situations. Help them understand how they can address those also show them how they can investigate and understand those phenomena better in order to be able to better respond to it and. And a lot of that, I think would would never fall under the official sort of, sort of heading of the search. But it is, it's being systematic, grounded. It is very scholarly, yet many of these people feel very intimidated by the idea of presenting what they know and what they found in platforms that are known as research journals or maybe resource conferences. So and this is changing, fortunately, I think, but sort of many times, these people either don't share what they know at all, or sort of fall back on presentations that are are very local, maybe, and very contextual. I did this, and I'm proud of it, but this step in between, I did this, and my reason for it was so and so my understanding of the issue I addressed came about by taking these and these reflective and analytical steps. All of that gets lost while, first of all, that doesn't do justice to all the knowledge and expertise that they that they possess, but also, by not sharing it, you miss out on on a potential of a professional exchange. Because I think it's, it's it's a hallmark of professionalism. I think that you that you do things in such a systematic, structured, methodical way. So, and I think in the world of advising, this has been and indeed, sort of many attempts have been made, and I think with with with success in different ways, but to to make sure that that kind of expertise isn't stifled by, yeah, being intimidated by what research with the big R may represent and how, how I may not sort of fit that sort of end. There was going to be another end, but now I lost track of my sentence. But anyways, it's, it's, it's, it's a profession and a field where a lot of that expertise exists that also can benefit a lot also, because that another thing is that there may be a reluctance to look at that kind of working because it may take away some of the personal dedication we give students, for instance, and our work isn't it more like a form, sort of like an art form? And I know I shouldn't have said that, Ryan, because that triggers a whole new conversation with you, but so many reasons to to to want to create a platform where people would feel invited to come and share that expertise and also feel facilitated and supported. So which is also how, why we, we ended up structuring, for instance, and maybe this is, again, something that David can talk about, but our review process the way we do, but yeah, that's this, this idea in short of scholarship and how we understand that as something that bridges the gap between the strict notion of research, on the one hand, and and professionalism and professional expertise on the other. I think that was really a driving force for us to to to create waypoint and structure waypoint the way we did.

Matt Markin  
No, I think that's it opens. Definitely can open the door to a lot of possibilities for many folks in higher education and maybe submitting something. And I guess that is a great segue, Oscar, and we'll throw it to David for this question is, you know, the journal emphasizes that practice based contribution. So, I mean, I guess, what does that look like in terms of, like, submissions, article types, review process?

David Grey  
Yeah, well, Oscar's already alluded to the review process, Matt. And I think what we really want to see the journal being is a community where we're bringing people together, and we want that to be, I guess, as inclusive as possible. And as part of that, we want the process of submitting and making a contribution to be as easy, and we want it to remove barriers and not be be something that puts people off. You know, no matter what your level of expertise, if you have something that's worth saying, We want to hear it, and we want to encourage you and support you, and actually being able to do that. So our review process is, it's an open review process, it's a dialogic review process. It's not a double blind process. I think sometimes with blind review, even if you're a seasoned academic writer, you get those reviews back from a reviewer. You have no idea who they are. You just get some written comments. And sometimes they can be, at best, a little harsh. Worst, if you're not used to that kind of writing, be the kind of thing that put you off from submitting a journal article altogether. And I think people hide behind those, those blind reviews sometimes, and say things that they might not say if they were in a face to face context with somebody. And also it's that written, the written form of communication when you're trying to provide feedback, it doesn't always come across exactly what you meant as the reviewer. And. In the same way that that's why you're reviewing, because the author, what they've written in the manuscript, may not come across, so you're trying to help. The role of the review should really be to try and help improve the article. So that's why we've gone for this open approach. Both the reviewer and the author know who who they are, and we encourage them to have a dialog, to have a conversation, and we had some great feedback from from some of our authors in the in the inaugural edition, about how valuable they found that that process of having a conversation with the reviewer, it helped them understand much better what the review was getting at with the comments and the feedback they were giving. And between the the two of them, they the two parties, they were able to produce an article that was much stronger and much better than the author thought in the first place. So hopefully it's a really supportive and developmental approach for people.

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, Matt mentioned it a little bit given the sort of philosophical positions of the founding of waypoint and the idea of these ways of understanding scholarship, you know, the scholarship of discovery, of course, but also the scholarship of application, scholarship of synthesis, scholarship and teaching. Waypoint has different article types as well. And could you tell us a little bit about the thinking and the different types of pieces that will show up in the publication?

Oscar van den Wijngaard  
Well, there's definitely room for what you might call the classical research article. So if, of course, particularly in the I think in the British context, where many people who are in an advising or in a personal tutor role are also academics. For some it may actually be sort of the format at least they feel most comfortable with, even though, in quite a few cases, it might still be that the topic, the subject matter, is new for them, because their own academic discipline may be different, but but we didn't, and we definitely did not want to exclude that. So switching from an emphasis on scholarship, or from an emphasis on research to one on scholarship, doesn't exclude the possibility and the desirability, actually, of great research articles still to be published as well. But in addition to that, we also thought there should be space for for other formats, indeed, and one of them is the opinion piece, where opinion really should be understood as, I don't want to say educated opinion, because that sounds a bit old fashioned, but sort of well structured and well reasoned for opinion, so that the rationale for for an opinion, for sharing an idea that the authors feel this matters to us. We want others to think about this as well. Doesn't necessarily need to come as at the end of a research paper, as a conclusion, but we're looking for and for something that could be called an argument where you really say there's a few premises, there's a few things that we see or that we know, and we feel that this should be looked at like this, and that it raises a question like that. So in that sense, not to do any injustice to to the phenomenon of the blog, for instance. But many blogs may just be the end of that. Say I think everyone should feel like so that's not the kind of opinion piece we're looking for. So we look for Russia now, and I think actually the two opinion pieces we have in the current issue are great examples of that, because they really employ literature related to their personal practice, and then say we've come to a conclusion that we feel is important for everyone, maybe more in how we should think about certain things within advising than how we should do certain things. So, so that's that's one thing that we wanted to create space and a platform for the under the other is the synthesis and application. That's somewhat similar. But then I think, whereas in the opinion pieces, we're particularly inviting authors to share maybe a more holistic perspective, sort of the two, I think in the current issue, one is about raising the question, haven't we become too individualistic in our approach to advising with the students? Aren't we emphasizing too much the what's in it? For me, kind of individualism, sort of in students, and isn't there a lot to that argues for, makes the case for bringing into an awareness and responsibility for the world around us, sort of into advising as a perspective. The other is an entirely different one, which is as part of your professional growth and development, take into account the unplanned encounters and epiphany. You may have in interacting with students and take time to reflect on those as well. Don't only fall follow the formal path in your professional development, but there's actually a lot of stuff happening in your daily practice that is worth pausing for afterwards. Actually, what happened here? So neither one is an immediate, sort of, maybe the second one a little bit, but sort of advises, sort of, or doesn't offer a model for application, but it's more sort of a suggestion to think about your profession in a certain way, and the synthesis and application Articles More go towards this. What could you do where the author or the authors could say, we've put a few theories next to each other, and we saw that actually they reinforce each other, or combined, they tell us a lot about sort of how we can approach the practice of advising. And I stress two theories here, because, again, here we don't expect someone to say, I've done a lot of research, and I now give this recommendation. Maybe it's a little bit more, but again, in a well structured and argued way, an epiphany that someone may have had. I've always been working with, say, self determination theory in my teaching, because I also teach, and all of a sudden I realized the applicability to the kind of advising I do, and to the kind of advising many people may be doing. And I think it works like this. So those, those articles we we hope, and I think the current ones do, but hopefully many more to come, also contribute to sort of a professional discourse on advising without being based on on research per se. 

David Grey  
So I think one of the things to note about the journal is it's an online only journal, so it doesn't have a print publication, and that gives us a lot more latitude to do things differently, to have different kinds of article formats. And we spent a long time as an editorial team thinking about the vision for the journal and what we were trying to achieve, and what were the right kind of article formats. So Oscar's elaborated the article formats we have there at the moment, that may not be where we eventually end up. That's what we have now, but we know that there, we wanted to make the journal accessible and to make it accessible to a wider audience than maybe a traditional research journal, and we know that we could do things in new and different and interesting ways. So hopefully as as the journal progresses, we're able to introduce some of those alternative approaches as well. So maybe video based pieces, or multimedia based pieces, and also on things that are easier to do online than they are to do in that traditional format. So it's an evolution. This is our starting point. We think this was a really good mix of Article formats for the first couple of additions, but we want to see that evolve, to make something that is accessible, and building that community of sharing professional practice.

Matt Markin  
With the issue already been out. What's been the feedback so far that you've heard?

David Grey  
I think the feedback has been very positive. We've had lots of really great feedback from people, and we're, we're really pleased to see the usage of the journal. So it's been out there six months, and we're averaging about 500 downloads a month, which we think is fantastic for a brand new journal. So if that in itself, is feedback, I think that's really positive. So yeah, it seems to be really good. And we know we've got lots of people coming forward saying, I'd really love to submit an article. I'm preparing an article. Here's an idea, and that's something that you know, we didn't say earlier. We're really happy to work with authors at the stage of an idea, before they even drafted a manuscript. If they've got an idea of something they want to say, we have a little rubric almost. They can complete a template they can complete to express an idea and come to us within idea, and then we can have to start that conversation and that dialog before they get into the process of creating a manuscript. So, yeah, hopefully positive all round.

Oscar van den Wijngaard  
Yeah, maybe a short anecdote which, which just happened the other day. I was sort of having a conversation with someone who had done, I thought, remarkable work bringing together elements of very concrete practice, but also the potential of turning that into a way of reviewing your your own practice. So work, the model to work with students, in itself, was almost like a review process for for the work as a, as a, as an advisor, and we got to talk about publishing, about that. And I said, Well, you know, there's obviously, there's many places where you can do this. What's your ambition with it? And I thought it was of great quality, also the process that had led up to it. So I suggested a few of the research journals. On on higher education and teaching and learning. But then this person said, Well, you know, that's that's not really my ambition, and I really hope that people will read this who are going to do something with it. I was actually thinking of waypoint, so I said, Well, okay, I can't guarantee anything, but by all means, submit. So, but I like that because, in a way, was an illustration of exactly what it is we hope to accomplish with himself.

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, I was looking over, of course, I read it as soon as it came out, and refreshing. In preparation for our conversation today, there were case studies as well, which I think is, you know, there's, there's often a conversation when we're talking about working with students, or in a sort of programmatic sense, or whatever, to strip away the details and to get to some sort of reproducible, transmittable kinds of concepts, but we share a little bit about like, the thinking on case study inclusion in the publication, and a little bit more on what that looks like if someone were interested in building a case study for publication.

Oscar van den Wijngaard  
David is silent, and he's giving me a meaningful look, but, well, I think again, sort of knowing that we we see waypoint really being right in the middle of the on a discourse on practice, you have to acknowledge the fact that, on the one hand, we clear in advising for a long time, there has has been, to a certain extent, a shared vocabulary. So it's not that no one understands what anybody else is doing or doesn't have the means to communicate it. But we also know that context can vary sort of wildly. Even within my institution, I think there are no we have six faculties. There are no two faculties where advising is organized exactly the same way, and that's just within within one institution. So I think that that makes it sort of critical to find a way of of extrapolating from those very sort of local contexts and practices, something that is still relevant to others. And I think this is where sort of the good case study comes in, where I think the case study does two things. It really explains the case really well, but it also sort of shows to the reader, doesn't leave it implicit, sort of how what happens in that particular place, or what what occurs in that particular place is of relevance to others. So that's really the exercise that I think we we encourage authors who would consider a case study to do also, because it is a wonderful way of having even a better understanding of your own case. If you, if you, if you, if you're, you're asked to look at it through the eyes of someone who is definitely familiar with the sort of the generalities of the field of advising, but not the specifics of where you're working and what you're doing. You're taking you're looking at it in a different way yourself, so that even before you publish, you have gained there, I think. But it also means that the fact that you're doing things the way you're doing because you serve a particular population, or you do that in a particular context, also means that no one else could be interested or could learn something from that, but you'll have to make the effort to to communicate that relevance to others. And I think if you do that, well, many people who read about your your case, about your context, will find that they understand a lot more about it actually, and recognize a lot more about it, then initially you thought they would, and they fight would, thought they would, because sometimes you also have this feeling. And I think I can, in the confined space of this podcast, say that this is definitely the case for our faculties, where I've had the fun and privilege to sit together with people from different faculties who came into a meeting, whether it was about education or advising, telling each other, yeah, we do things really differently. And then at the end of the meeting, thought and said, sometimes, hmm, we have a lot in common. So that's that's a nice sort of side effect that a good case study could also have, that to see those similarities, but yeah, the process of describing a local phenomenon and how you responded to it, or how you understand it sort of in ways that makes it relevant to others, is meaningful for those others, but also for yourself, I think.

Matt Markin  
These are all great suggestions and tips. One thing I do want to get the your kind of opinion on is, let's say someone's listening to this and they're like, I feel like this could be something. I could submit something for. You know, we talked about the capital R for research. But what if someone feels like I just don't feel like I have the support? From my institution or from my supervisor or my department, any advice that maybe that person might be able to share with their their immediate administrators, that maybe they can get more support for maybe writing something and submitting?

Oscar van den Wijngaard  
Well, what I liked about you have your ideas about this too, no doubt, David, but sort of what I like, for instance, about sort of this encounter I had just the other day with that person I was talking about, was that this person was going to, was considering writing about something that that they were doing as part of their practice. And there might have been a bit of aha moment also for that person when we talked about, hey, this is actually sort of, it's a great it's a great way of supporting students on a particular aspect of what you want to do, but it's also a way of reviewing how you're doing this that brings it closer, even to things like sort of quality assurance and and I don't want to say accountability. I it's not that I'm always against accountability, but accountability isn't a word that sounds like it instills a lot of inspiration in people quality assurance or quality care, maybe does. But So once this sort of supposed or this perceived burden of now I have to find time to set up a whole research project has been dispelled a little bit. I think it would be interesting to look for ways to integrate a lot of that work that eventually would go into writing an article in the Daily Practice one way or another. And I know this is still easier said than done, but if you can, for instance, sort of explain to a supervisor that what you're doing is also a great way of reviewing a certain practice and maybe also putting your institution sort of on the map, which is sometimes also sort of a great thing to do, but that might make a difference. And I think what might help there, and we're definitely very open to the idea of articles being submitted by a group of authors is that sort of would become a team effort, and not just something you do in isolation, which always feels and usually also is even much of a bigger burden in time and effort than if you can, can do this with a with a with a team. So it is, it is a challenge. I think that has to be sort of acknowledge that it one one way or other, there will always be elements of the writing process that come on top of the other things you're doing, but if you don't see them as completely separate from from the other things you're doing, maybe also as a way of reflecting on your own practice and benefiting from it like that, it might be easier to to find the time and also to convince others to let you find a little bit of time. But David, I don't know what you think.

David Grey  
Yeah, no, I agree with that entirely. Oscar, I think what you're talking about, we would probably in the UK term, it quality enhancement, so enhancing the quality of what you do and taking any sort of opportunity to reflect on your current practice and to think about that in the context of the wider field or the scholarship of the field, can only serve to enhance what you do so writing something that might be submitted to the journal, and being able to express that kind of reflection in a way that's beneficial to others is definitely beneficial to you too, and hopefully to your institution and your students. So it's not a something that you would do as an end in itself. It's something that would fall out naturally, out of that process of, as you say, not being accountable, but taking the opportunity to reflect. I think maybe one of the things we see in our work with UKAT, working with we work very closely with our member institutions, and what we hear a lot from institutions, a lot of the time, is we want to learn from other people. We want to learn from the practice that other institutions have got. We want to share and be part of this community in all sorts of different ways. And I think this is just one of those ways in which you can share, in which you can learn from others. And if you've done something that's useful and valuable, other people want to hear about it in the same way that you want to hear about the valuable things that others have done. So where, where administrators might be wanting themselves to learn from or benefit from the experiences that other institutions have had, then maybe this is a way of paying back, you know, encouraging your own staff to actually contribute is a way of paying back the sort of academic citizenship to the field. And perhaps some of that depends also on who it is, who's actually writing. I think we have different, different authorships who might get involved in writing articles for the journal Oscar already, I think, alluded to the fact that many of the practitioners of advising in the UK are academic staff. They may have a slightly different sell to their administrators to allow them to actually contribute than maybe somebody who's a professional advisor. A full time advisor or in a non academic role within an institution. So we see that kind of real desire for sharing often coming more out of the non academic side or the administrative side of the institution. For those who are in academic roles, I think they feel different pressures in the UK and Oscar can probably describe the situation elsewhere in Europe a bit better than me, but certainly in the UK, there's a lot of pressure. If you are an academic, if you are publishing, it needs to be something that's going to contribute to the research standing, the research prowess of the of the institution, and the way that the institution is ranked nationally for research. And unfortunately, a journal like waypoint is not going to do that. So they're they're unlikely to get that support. They're only ever likely to be encouraged to publish in their own disciplinary field. But what we're really keen to hear from is people who are publishing beyond their disciplinary field, from from people who are thinking about advising, because that's something beyond their discipline. So that's a very different sell for them. But I think the people who do get involved also share that real community spirit and wanting to share their knowledge and experience with others to benefit others elsewhere, and that real sort of collegial approach. I think it is a very collegial thing.

Ryan Scheckel  
Absolutely. And you know, as we wrap up here, David, you talked a little bit about the intention to grow and to evolve. And I know we're a single issue in I know, but things are in progress. So where can we find the journal, and what do you look to see in the coming years from waveform?

David Grey  
Okay, so you're going to give me a memory test. Now, aren't you to remember where you find the journal in the web address the journal. You can find all the details@journal.ucat.ac.uk or on the UKAT website. There's a page on the UKAT website, and I can't remember the address off off the top of my head, but if you go on the main UKAT website, you'll see a link there for the journal. Yeah, we are. We are only one edition in our intention is to produce at least one edition a year in the spring of each year. So we're well we're well underway with the creation of the second edition. Now we've got a good number of contributions, which is fantastic, but always space to receive more. We are hoping and intending that from this point onwards, it's going to be a rolling publication process, so as soon as an article is complete and accepted for publication, it will appear online, and then every year we'll collate an edition. So that's also one of the benefits of the the online only approach. And if we get, if we get enough contributions, and we can move it to more than once a year, we'd be delighted to do so. So yeah, watch this space. I think.

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, fantastic, Oscar and David, thanks so much for joining us. We're super excited. We'll watch waypoints career with much interest, and we appreciate the time you spent talking with us today.

Oscar van den Wijngaard  
I just saw that if you simply Google, you get waypoint. It gets you straight to waypoint too.

Ryan Scheckel  
Of course, always recommending we use our tools. Thanks, Oscar.