 Hi, everyone. Welcome back to UCAT Festival TV with me, Colm Cronin, and today I am delighted to be joined by the very wonderful Wendy Troxel. Wendy, how are you keeping? Wonderful, Colm. How are you, my friend? I'm very well. Delighted to have the opportunity to chat to you all the way from the great state of Texas. That's right. That's right. Nice and warm still here. Yeah, we're at the tail end of summer here, and we were obviously supposed to have Emily McIntosh join us, but due to circumstances beyond her control, she can't. But you are a wonderful representative of the research agenda that both UCAT and NACADA undertake, and you wear so many hats and so capable of it. But maybe you could talk to me, I suppose, a little bit, Wendy, around the research work that you're doing with UCAT. Thank you so much, and I'm really sorry that Emily's not here because she is the chair of the UCAT Research Committee and is such a wonderful voice, a scholar, a mentor, and a leader in that area. But I've been actually honored to be involved with the UCAT Research Committee since the beginning quite a few years ago now. The role that I have with NACADA as director of the NACADA Center for Research at Kansas State University and connected with the NACADA Research Committee. We have from the start offered a really strong collaboration between the research agenda, the researchers and the scholars and teachers of both associations. So the UCAT Research Committee is a really important, one of the really the first committees, formal committees of UCAT. And knowing that to advance the practice, the policy, the philosophies, the approaches of advising and personal tutoring requires deep connections to the literature base. And the ability to both help advisors and tutors access the literature, use the literature as pedagogical tools and strategies for their work is really important. And we call those scholarly tutors or scholarly advisors. And you don't have to be a researcher, you don't have to have done a statistical equation to be a scholar. If you access the literature and consider the deeper underpinnings of our work with students and the context of the work that we do, then you really are viewed, you view your work in a scholarly way. So accessing the literature, collecting and curating the literature is a really important part of the work of the UCAT Research Committee as well as NACADA's research arm. And then helping individuals and teams beef up their research skills and conceptualize research studies or philosophical inquiries and helping them with tools and techniques to do that. The UCAT Research Committee has a research mentoring program, a 14-month, pretty intensive support for individuals who want to be a part of that and want to kind of talk through how they can do this kind of inquiry on their own. And so they do that as well as some other initiatives that I'm sure we'll get into. I think the work is just phenomenal that is undertaken because when you work in any sort of maybe student support area, the idea of research can initially seem so daunting and so technical and just so far beyond what maybe some of us do on a day-to-day basis. And I found through UCAT, through you, through Emily and NACADA through Oscar and others, Craig McGill, the ability to make it accessible. I think that is what is so brilliant in these organizations and so welcome. And I have found so much benefit from that. So thank you for the work that you do on that. And I know that there is a new, is it publication in the works? And maybe you could tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, happy to. This is really exciting. And Emily has really led this along with David Gray, Oscar von den Weinhardt from the Netherlands and Professor Liz Thomas, who is a good friend of UCAT, of course. And so we are the editors of this special edition of Frontiers in Education, the Leadership in Education series. And so this special edition is all about advising and tutoring. And a number of articles have been published already. It's kind of a rolling publication process, but very soon will be announcing kind of the package in its entirety of the issue. And it's a series of really a global lenses to the scholarship and the scholarly arms of advising and tutoring. And there's a series of straight research reports. There are essays, there are opinion papers, there are kind of policy papers. And so this will offer a really important current look at a wide range of topics and issues and theories related to advising and personal tutoring. That's really important. And it's connected to another project that we have going. We're about to launch, which is kind of a content analysis of 15 years of research in the area of advising and tutoring. But this, you know, we touch students at every point of their educational journey in every program, major, discipline, in every phase of their academic life. And so the impact that we have on them, the influence we have on them, really does need to be captured in lots of different ways. Social science research, of course, kind of qualitative, quantitative is the typical, but also philosophical approaches and humanities approaches and, you know, attacking and and talking about the theories that kind of underpin our work. So this special edition is a really exciting next step in the scholarship. Fantastic. Actually, some of the points that you spoke to there were, I think, related certainly to Peter Hagan's opening keynote earlier on. So I can definitely see synergies already there. And Wendy, I suppose, if people are interested in finding out a little bit more about this, is the website the best place for them to go? Yes. It will be featured on the UCAT website soon. You could go to the Frontiers and Education website. I'm sorry, I don't have that URL right at my fingertips. And look for the advising and tutoring issue. But a list of those articles and kind of the issue when it gets packaged will absolutely be highlighted on the UCAT website. Fantastic. And we can make sure that we're to put the link when we're posting this. But alongside all of that work, you are also involved in presenting a session at the UCAT conference. Yeah. So on Thursday at 11 o'clock, I believe, I'll be revealing some of the sub-analysis that we've done on the 15-year content analysis. And so that session will be taking a look at the theoretical frameworks that have been used in the advising and tutoring literature over the last almost two decades. And so take a look at and we borrow, we really borrow and apply existing theory to the context of advising and tutoring. Some would argue there are theories of advising, others would argue there are theories for advising. And so if we think about the work that we do with students, we think about how we communicate with them, how we relate to them, how they learn, how they mature. And so the theories of sense of belonging and cognitive learning and self-efficacy and all of those types of theories that are used in learning and development absolutely apply and are relevant to the context that we are in with students and how we learn from each other. And so the scholarly advisors, the scholarly tutors understand that there's a pedagogy to the work we do with students, that there is learning that we hope happens and maturity that we hope we help develop. And so documentation for that and exploration for that is really important to advancing our profession. Excellent. Well, having seen you present at conferences previously, I know that delegates are in for a treat and want to wish you the best with that. There are a whole host of events, I think taking place in the remaining days of the conference. And so for viewers, you can also check out the social media and the website and you'll find a lot more details on there. Wendy, I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to chat with me and I really appreciate it. I'm honored and delighted and good luck to everybody for the rest of the festival. It's a wonderful event.