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

Teaching the Practice of Politics
which do distinguish better from worse work, and these are appended with
our module guide below (see Appendix 10.1). But it would clearly be
ridiculous to judge and grade, for example, a statement of personal values,
so we simply require other elements to be completed.
Given the widely differing levels of opportunity students have had to
develop public-speaking skills, we decided that, at least at the beginning of
this initiative, rather than assessing the quality of the public-speaking
directly, we would instead assess engagement with how to improve the skill
via a reflection on public-speaking skills informed by tutor and peer
feedback. The reflective diary, which is routinely used as assessment for
professional training in, for example, degree programmes in health or
social work, is also an effective way of assessing development of the people
skills we address (see, e.g., Moon 1999). As well as a reflective diary, we
also asked students to analyse a famous speech of their choice for
effectiveness, and we made available a number of tools which they could
use to do this – probably the most useful being an explanation of the
differing places of ethos, pathos and logos in public communication,
although we mentioned several other tools of the rhetorical trade also.
Learning resources
As well as module development, we also spent a lot of time developing
electronic resources to support our work. These have included the
following:
• template for statement of personal values
• template for statement of personal priorities
• resources for identifying internships
• occupational profiles for public-service-related work: Sally
Gillman, author of Politico’s Guide to Careers in Politics and
Government (2001), has updated parts of her work for us, and
we have created detailed profiles for the following: politician,
politician’s staff, working in parliament, local councillor, civil
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