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

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The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics ‘I gained tremendously from this module, not in content but more as a catalyst.’ This was, of course, encouraging, although the last comment reinforced the need to articulate and reinforce our intended outcomes in terms of skills development and make them much more central to our inclass activities, a conclusion reinforced by our external evaluator. Conclusions Is this an approach we would recommend to others? Unambiguously, yes. The fact that we were able to combine generic career-development education with a subject-specific component created a level of engagement with the activities which most people who have tried this as a generic activity have found elusive. To hear that the activities have helped many participants to choose a next step after the degree is hugely rewarding for us; readers will be aware of the all-pervasive anxiety about where next that haunts so many finalists in the lead-up to the end of their time at university. We were also delighted to hear the numbers who have set their face towards developing a politics-related career and who are prepared to give this time to come about, rather than stumbling into the first post that is offered out of a sense of resignation. Clearly we don’t have any direct evidence that this is aspiration-raising. Maybe these students would have set their personal targets at this level anyway? However, it can’t make the situation worse. What about skills development? Again, there are some good individual stories. Any teacher who has experimented with reflective writing exercises will confirm how diverse student responses to this are but will also confirm that when it works it is extraordinarily powerful. The individual who reflected on an exercise on listening and came to the realisation that rather than being the good listener she thought she was she actually had the same range of issues as everybody else about not listening now has a choice as to whether to listen or not which did not previously 134
Teaching the Practice of Politics exist. Likewise, the student who acknowledged in a reflection on working in a team the range of behaviours that they used which actually damaged group effectiveness now has a choice about whether to continue to behave in those ways. We could give many more such examples. However, it is difficult in the environment in which we operate to take this insight anything like as far as we believe it could and should go. External examiners are highly sceptical about forms of writing which are not ‘objectively’ better or worse, and to learn effective self-reflection is a soft skill that needs frequent practice over a whole programme, not just a module. Have we helped our classes to become more effective speakers? Well, clearly opportunities to practise in a safe environment with tutor and peer feedback can’t make things worse. We found that the political-speech analysis mostly worked well. Students took on board the meaning of the rhetorical devices we’d talked about, and mostly wrote thoughtful and incisive commentaries, and no doubt this will lead to some more experimentation with these in future. However, the quality of the actual public-speaking was not, by and large, all that impressive: in Aristotelian terms it was dominated by logos (arguments based on evidence). Students were not comfortable with ethos in the sense of making themselves visible, or pathos, since emotions are censored in most of their other degree work. We didn’t assess speaking directly, so the incentive structure was not conducive to really good performance. In our classes on the topic we made much material about effective preparation and dealing with publicspeaking nerves available, but the reflections showed less evidence that this had been understood or acted on than we had hoped. Our overall conclusion on this is that it is such a specialist skill that it really needs a module of its own, as well as, once again, repeated opportunities to put into practice what we taught in this module throughout the degree programme. So we fervently hope that our arguments here, rather than just being taken up by the occasional enthusiast, can prompt whole programmes to consider whether they can integrate the kinds of activities we have tried out into several places at all levels. The first programmes 135
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The Scholarship of Engagement for P
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C-SAP Monographs Monograph No. 1: B
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Contents Foreword: E-Learning: Enga
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Foreword: E-Learning: Engagement an
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Foreword placements with an enhance
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Preface gave us all more confidence
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Preface educators (along with place
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Contributors John Annette is Dean o
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Contributors rehabilitation program
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Contributors bodies work together w
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Part I: Introduction
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Chapter 3 Rethinking Placement Lear
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Rethinking Placement Learning for P
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Chapter 6 Engaging Students through
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Chapter 13 Exploring Scrutiny and D
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Part IV: New Directions in the Teac
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