When discussing their experiences of teaching and learning during the Covid year, some first gens would comment directly on classes they had taken with me, or on the work I had done in trying to support first gens more widely.

As a lecturer and often the actual teacher of many of the students I was interviewing (albeit after they had finished their year with me and exams were done etc.,) the power dynamic was still clearly rather different from, say, a PhD student conducting ‘elite’ interviews for the first time. Acutely conscious of this, I tried to say to all interviewees at the outset that they needed to be as truthful as they could be and if that involved pointing to my own deficiencies that year, then they had to do so, and not hold back.

Quite a few interviewees were fairly positive about my own teaching etc., and I did wonder whether they might have said something different to another interviewer (though my student module evaluation scores that year were fairly good as well, I suppose..).

But there were criticisms too; the strongest was from an interviewee who quite rightly objected to an incident (that I’d forgotten) when I’d asked about her possible first gen. status because I had noticed she had a slight regional accent. The interview gave me the chance to apologise there and then and resolve to be more sensitive in how I framed such conversations in future. Analysing that particular interview recently, I realised again how especially rich and insightful it is.