The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics: - Higher Education ...

Preface
This book grows out of the Scholarship of Engagement for Politics, a threeand-a-half-year
research project exploring means of embedding researchbased
placement learning into the politics and international relations
curricula in the United Kingdom. The project was funded by the Higher
Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) through Phase 5 of its
Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL5) (project
number FDTL 16/03). We gratefully acknowledge this financial support
without which this work would not have been possible.
Most of the chapters in this volume were first presented at the
eponymous end-of-project conference we organised at the University of
Warwick on 10–11 June 2008, but all of the contributors are colleagues
with whom we established or further developed relationships through this
project. Personally we count the building of these links with colleagues
engaged in similar activities as one of the most important benefits of the
project, and we are very grateful to all of the contributors for their
participation in this volume and for the good humour and patience with
which they put up with our reminders of deadlines and requests for minor
amendments to their draft chapters. While this book presents the main
findings of our project, we were determined that it should also include
other important models of excellence and best practice relating to
placement learning, community engagement, citizenship and employability
for students of politics and international relations that we discovered
through our research.
The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics was entirely a team
effort, so our thanks go to our colleagues with whom it was such a pleasure
and intellectually stimulating experience to work: the project director
Philippa Sherrington and the project manager Caroline Gibson at the
University of Warwick, through whose hard work the project was more
successful than we could have hoped; and Barrie Axford and Richard
Huggins at Oxford Brookes University, whose experience and expertise
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