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

The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics
International Alert, an NGO with great experience of training peace
workers, presents the organisation’s side of this relationship. Appended to
these chapters are the module outline and other materials that will be
useful for educators wishing to adopt this model of campus-based
simulation. In Chapter 8, Alvaro Mellado Domínguez, a student with many
years’ experience of real conflict zones through the work he has done for
Médecins Sans Frontières, provides a student’s perspective and describes
the benefits of this model in terms of personal and career development and
helping participants to discover if they have the qualities to survive and
succeed in such difficult environments.
The contributions to Part III revolve around the themes of
placement assessment, community engagement, citizenship education and
employability. In Chapter 9, David Woodman draws on his extensive
experience of running placement learning programmes to explore a
problem with students’ understanding of the meaning of reflection in
learning journals or diaries, which tend to contain overly personalised
accounts of feelings rather than working towards improved and more
effective practice. As Woodman demonstrates, how we think about the
assessment of placement activities is intimately related to what we
understand by placement learning itself. He raises some very important
and challenging questions for the way in which placement learning is
currently practised in many higher education institutions.
Woodman’s arguments lead us directly to the matter of
employability, which is generally seen as one of the main benefits of
placements but which has often posed perplexing questions for lecturers
and students in seemingly non-vocational subjects such as politics and
international relations. The following four chapters help us think through
ways of going forward. Mantz Yorke and Peter Knight have pointed out
that employability can be addressed at the level of the module or the
curriculum as a whole (2006: 14). We explore both avenues. In Chapter 10,
Matthew Wyman and Sarah Longwell evaluate the excellent and innovative
module they have developed at Keele University, which aims to prepare
students for careers in politics. Their chapter also details the novel modes
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