Interviewing Revd Jenny Paddison

- Anglican Chaplain at NTU

3rd December 2014

My first visit to the WellBeing Centre was during the last week of November, and due to having such an engaging conversation with Chaplain Jenny on that occasion, I arranged to make a second visit to the centre to further enquire about the space, through the means of an interview. My questions were relating to the general functioning of the space, the general needs of students who visit, and seeking professional advice relating to potential sites for a design proposal.

How often do students come here saying they’re stressed and they simply say they just want somewhere to be at peace? Is that something that happens regularly or not particularly?

J: They wouldn’t say it in those terms. We do get quite a few people coming in at various levels of stress and anxiety and it can be very, you know… It could be home sickness, so it could be as low level as feeling home sick up until doing themselves quite serious harm. And we don’t get thousands of people (laughs), but we do have statistics that maybe I could share with you in numbers. But what they’ll say is that they’re depressed, or unhappy or anxious, sometimes they will articulate it. I mean, obviously if someone comes to you and says I’m really, really uptight and I’m really stressed, obviously what they want is to not be! They’re looking for something, but sometimes they will say “I just want to lose all of that and be in control of my life” and they might sometimes use the word ‘peace’. It’s unlikely they would express it in those terms, but that’s clearly what they are wanting, they want to feel calm.

Is there a particular time of day you’ve noticed the space be at its busiest? Is there some sort of pattern or time of the year perhaps?

J: Yeah there are definite patterns… Well, I say that, but then you do get an odd sort of exception at times. But the times when it’s at its busiest is… It sort of has a slight crescendo in the first term, as people get to know the place and find out that it’s here because one of our biggest problems is people knowing that it’s here. But as people start to know it, and there’s word of mouth, you get a sort of increase, crescendo, so it’s been busy the last few weeks. Then, it stabilises over the second term. We do a lot of work with the international students, on Tuesdays we have a lunch for them and what we find is that when the Erasmus students return back to their own countries the numbers obviously fall down. So it gets slightly quieter. In terms of students looking for support particularly, the beginning of the summer term is generally quite high. I think that’s probably echoed in the Student Support Services generally. Because, what happens is, if you’ve got some sort of underlying anxieties or some sort of problems, what people will tend to do is try and get on top of it. And they’ll just try and supress it slightly and get on with their lives. But when extra pressure starts coming through, they find that they can’t cope and it gets a bit too much. And so, with the exam period, the combination of the stress of exams plus the issues are combined and sort of erupt. That generally happens at the beginning of the summer term when they realise. So that’s when we tend to get an increase in people coming here and coming to student support services generally. In terms of the time of day, its quiet first thing in the morning, and then it gets busier around lunch time. It varies a bit in the afternoon but it depends on the time of day, and that’s generally the pattern. Wednesday is one of the quietest days, I think because its sports day at Uni, so there’s only lectures for half the day, then people go off and do their own thing.

Do students mainly come here alone or do they usually come here with friends? Or is it a bit of both?

J: I think it depends on the reason why they’re coming. The feedback I get from students, is they come into the wellbeing room to find their friends and to be with their friends, or they might come there to meet their group of friends. But it’s an interesting thing because they find support then they find their stress levels are dissipating. They calm down by being with their friends, and being in a place they feel safe. It’s nothing to do with Richard or myself, it’s their friends that give them that sense of belonging, acceptance, etc. So there’s those who do that, but then there are those who are actually looking for some very specific support. So then they’ll come on their own or they’ll be referred and they will come and particularly want to speak to a chaplain. And then, their journey after that if often that they’ll chat with us and then go off and get support in other places and that’s generally the pattern. Sometimes, I’ve had the situation where a student will come and chat with me, meet their friends in there then do a bit of socialising and then another day they’ll come along and say ‘Oh Jenny can I have a chat?’ and that’s fine, so we’ll just have a chat.

So would you say the WellBeing room gets much more used than the Quiet and Prayer room?

J: Yes, absolutely, and that’s how it should be. I mean, that [points to Wellbeing room] is a social space, and that [points to quiet prayer room] is deliberately a quiet space. Generally speaking, my sense is that if there’s someone in the prayer room on their own and someone comes along and go’s in, and see that there’s one person in there, they will then withdraw and wait until it’s free.

Me: So it’s very much sort of a ‘one person at a time’ in there?

J: Yeah I think that’s what people want. Sometimes you’ll get a small group going in there to pray, and I know that happens but it is generally a sort of private space

Do you like where this space is located on campus?

J: I think it has advantages and disadvantages. So the advantage, is that if you are looking for quiet, it’s an out of the way place. It’s not in a public welfare, it’s not a walk-through, and you do really need to deliberately be coming here. There’s no “oh I just sort of stumbled upon it” sort of thing. The biggest issue we have as I’ve mentioned before [about it not being well-known], is that people say to me over and over and over again: “I never knew it was here, I wish I’d known it was here, because if I’d known it was here I would have started using it earlier. It’s not properly sign-posted, it’s impossible to find…” – I get that over and over and over again.

Me: I think I’d have to agree with ever one of those statements, I would have said the same!

J: [Laughs] Exactly! But we don’t deliberately not advertise it. We’ve done a huge amount of work into making sure it’s known about, but I think one of the problems with it is generally speaking, students kind of find us when they need us. There’s no point in advertising it universally in Welcome Week because that’s not necessarily when people need us…They’re out doing their clubbing, they’re out doing whatever else, the other kind of socialising. Then they might find a bit later in the term that actually “I really want to talk to somebody!” And that’s when they need us, but it’s ‘how do you reach them at that point?’

Me: So perhaps there needs to be more advertising further into the year?

J: So what we do is, we have what we call ‘Week 3’ which obviously happens in week 3 of term, where we’ve tried to promote this place in that week and we do lunches every day and that kind of stuff and we try to give out a lot of little postcards, etc. That’s when we really push it, in that sort of time. But again, it’s very hard to know how to do it in a targeted way, in an appropriate way, and in a successful way.

Do you think if it was in its own separate building, it would maybe be more well-known? Or would it kind of defy the whole feeling of this cosy space that people directly come to if it were more in the middle of campus for example?

J: I know that there are other universities which have what they would call a faith centre or a chaplaincy centre… There’s one in Derby University for example, which is almost as soon as you get onto campus, it’s just there, this humungous building right in front of you, very striking architecture. And I don’t know how well it’s used or exactly the usage but it’s definitely a ‘you can’t miss it’ kind of thing. I think it’s going back to what I’ve said before really… In some ways, people want it to be private because it’s out of the way, it’s not obvious. And maybe some people might feel that they don’t want it to be known, that they’re going to a place like this.

Me: So it’s almost as though they quite like it being quite tucked away and small?

J: Yeah, so, I don’t know – There’s a tension there. People need to know it’s there if they need it, but they don’t want it to be really over-exposed potentially.

In terms of the two dedicated rooms you’ve got here for the Islamic prayer, do you think the space should be able to offer separate rooms for each different religion? If the space permitted it of course, do you think that would work?

J: I work with the Christian union a bit, and I think the Christian union would love to have a dedicated room for Christianity.

Again, this is about looking at other universities and their spaces and how they work. So, one University I visited, they had a very similar multi-faith prayer room like ours, but much bigger. And the way the Coordinating Chaplain did it was, he had the objects that are important and unique to each faith, he’d keep them in these storage areas, so if you had a Hindu group came in for example, they could take their box and put out what was important to them. So that’s one approach you could take. What we try and do here, is to keep it neutral, and what you would probably need to do is talk to each faith community and say ‘do you need the space to be set and kept and maintained as a Hindu space or a Jewish space, etc.’ I mean, the Jews wouldn’t pray in there, because I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t find that a useful space. Christians understanding of their faith, is they can pray anywhere. I could pray in here, I could pray in there or outside, I could pray anywhere, so they don’t have those kind of limitations or expectations. So, multi-faith areas, will have all those issues come up. I’ll have to direct you to a website about sacred spaces because in all public areas such as hospitals, airports, universities, schools, etc. they are facing those kind of issues. There are debates about it, forums, etc. and it’s really interesting to look into it.

What kind of building would you expect to see the WellBeing space to be moved into? And what do you think it needs to provide if it were being moved to the City campus for example?

J: When we’re talking about these things, we don’t have a lot of choice, we simply get what we’re given…

Me: But hypothetically, if you were able to choose the kind of space you wanted…?

J: From my perspective in this job, the space needs to be flexible. Because you’re working with so many different people, and you’re working with people that will come from a very strong faith position. You might have a very devout atheist who will want to use the space just to sit and reflect. That’s absolutely fine, but the space has to be comfortable for that person, but it also has to be comfortable for Jews who would want to be in there, Hindus, all the religions should be able to feel that they should be able to use it. The Muslims need their own space and they need to have their own washrooms and there are requirements, where they need to go through their own routine and cleansing which is very important for them. So you have to go through a long consultation with all the faith groups, and almost just offer it to the whole university and ask ‘if you were to do this, and you would be somebody to us it, what would you like to see?’ So it would be a massive consultation exercise. Then, you’d develop it from there, but what you can imagine is that it would need to be enormously flexible! From the experience of working here, the hospitality is massive, so what I feel we need to provide is hospitality and sanctuary. So the sanctuary is what I’ve just been taking about – a space to feel comfortable and safe, and the hospitality would need to provide a fridge, surface, etc. But it becomes much more complicated than just a kitchen, because the Jewish faith will need a separate fridge for their kosher food for example, so you do need to keep on talking to people and asking ‘how would this work for you? If we had a kitchen, how would you store your food? How would it be prepared?’ so there’s quite a lot going on there, then you have the pragmatic realities of how university works - What’s our budget? And what can we fit into this budget?

It’s very complicated. It would be very straight forward to provide a social area and a quiet area, if that’s all it is. As soon as you throw religion into the mix, it becomes really, really complicated! So from your perspective, you need to decide which project you’re going to do. We even made a mistake here… When they built this here, they didn’t install a bidet into the toilet, and we only found out relatively recently that all Muslims need to have a bidet for them to do their prayers. So the bide was installed this year! So, it’s that kind of thing you really need to have long conversations with leaders of the faith communities but also people with a very broad understanding of their faith and not just one particular angle.

My interview with Jenny lasted approximately 45mins on this occasion. I have included the primary questions here which are directly relevant to my research, however, there are further questions which have been documented for further reference elsewhere if needed.

Questionnaire 3

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