Using active learning techniques to facilitate employability and enterprise skil
Using active learning techniques to facilitate employability and enterprise skills acquisition
Professor Karen Heard-Lauréote and Dr Mark Field
What is the idea?
This active learning strategy utilises the opportunities and challenges of embedding employability and enterprise skills within the curriculum in UK higher education undergraduate provision. By delivering skills acquisition through a standalone module, this strategy addresses the question as to how academics can ‘teach’ employability and enterprise.
To promote the acquisition of transferable employability and enterprise skills, we developed and introduced a second-year module ‘Politics and Policy in Action’ to the undergraduate Politics and International Relations curriculum. This thirteen-week module is designed as a continuously assessed simulation exercise which allows students to develop and then demonstrate key employability skills such as communication, problem-solving and decision-making. The learning and teaching strategy shifts away from the didactic approach towards more student-centred and student-directed learning (Bovill, 2020).
Throughout the module, students work in small, self-managed groups of four or five. They are required to apply discipline, knowledge, principles and concepts applicable to civil society and social mobilisation, to engage in the analysis of policy and the development of an ensuing campaign or lobbying strategy to effectively influence policy. The taught element of the module is delivered by both academic staff and practitioners involved in local campaigns. The latter offer practical guidance on campaigning and provide feedback on both the groups’ campaign proposals and on their final campaign launch.
In the delivery of the practical assessment outlined at module start, students are required to use creative thinking and problem-solving skills, strategic planning skills, teamwork and delegation skills and to be able to deliver a brief. These are all key, advanced employability skills that will stand students in good stead for their future careers by providing them with practical work-based examples to draw on in applications, assessment centres and interviews.
The module constitutes a step-change in the provision of employability within the Politics and International Relations curriculum. Rather than seeking to teach the skills associated with employability, students naturally acquire these skills through the selection, management and delivery of their own campaign. In its design, the module utilises assessment as a continuous and formatively driven exercise which includes team activities (summatively assessed through the group campaign proposal and the final group campaign launch) and a comprehensive individual activity (assessed through a detailed self-reflective journal with several formative submission points along the way).
Formal module feedback from the students has been positive, particularly in terms of the creation of their campaign. Important