Introduction to Transferable Skills
Richard Beggs; Tab Betts; and Matt Parkman
Preparing students for the professional workplace, in addition to enabling them to develop discipline expertise, is becoming more and more important. These transferable skills are often seen as crucial factors that add to the individual’s employability (Nägele & Stalder, 2017). The World Economic Forum (2020) published the predicted top 10 skills for employment in 2025, highlighting the skills needed to succeed as well as those in demand; these range from critical thinking, problem solving and analytical skills to active learning, learning strategies and resilience. This demand has led to the development of some toolkits to encourage the fostering of these so called ‘soft’ skills in students such as the eLene4Life (2020) Dynamic Toolkit. The chapters collected under this theme explore various transferable skills, partnerships with industry and practical guides and tips to implementing them.
Academic Reading and Writing Skills
This section draws attention to the importance of active learning when considering more “academic” elements of teaching and learning. The use of active learning can enable learners to aid their engagement with activities such as reading, and essay/report writing.
Authors discuss ways in which these activities can become more interesting and engaging to learners, ultimately leading to positive outcomes. Suggestions include innovations such as Little’s student writing retreats, transferring practice from academic development workshops to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, and Hancock’s dissertation speed dating.
Garnham describes her approach that breaks down the process of report writing into a series of active learning activities. The benefits of co-writing are explored by Middleton, whilst Rutschmann details a student-led Journal club that encourages discussion and critical engagement.
To get students reading high-quality academic sources, Stevens shares his approach to getting students in groups to read and share understanding in passes incrementally challenging them to delve deeper. Taylor describes her “10 steps to success” guide to writing essays for students that utilises active learning approaches, while Stockton-Brown shows how inviting students to engage with their emotional responses to set topics resulted in active – and deep – learning.
The underlying premise of all of the contributions within this section is to increase interaction between learners, providing opportunity for reflection, and ensuring safe environments for learners to discuss and explore ideas that interest them, which may ultimately help them in their written work.
Critical Thinking
Miri et al. (2007) state that students need to go beyond building their knowledge capacity to develop their higher-order thinking skills. This section of the book looks at ways in which learners can creatively engage with material in a critical manner, through the use of role-playing,