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

The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics
of assessment they have devised. In line with our intention that this book
should contain practical guidance, Wyman’s module guide is appended to
the chapter (see also Wyman 2009). The alternative approach to
enhancing students’ employability is set out by Fiona Buckley in Chapter
11, in which she outlines how employability is enhanced throughout the
four-year BA Government curriculum at University College Cork (UCC).
This approach is similar in some respects to the ‘capability envelope’ model
of John Stephenson and Mantz Yorke (1998), but at UCC the mandatory
work placement at the end of the third year is accorded central importance.
Buckley describes the preparation students receive ahead of their
placements, explains how their experiences are integrated into their final
year studies and evaluates the benefits in terms of employability and
learning.
In Chapter 12, Andrew Mycock describes the revisions he made to
the mandatory work-placement module at the University of Huddersfield.
This was one of the first work-placement modules to be offered to students
of politics in the country, but Mycock felt that it had to be reworked to
meet the needs of a changing student body, and we were delighted that he
adopted some of the ideas and practices we developed in the project and
that he worked with us during the transferability stage. Mycock also brings
to placement learning his specialist knowledge in the area of citizenship
education, thereby addressing both the citizenship and employability
themes of this book. In Chapter 13, one of Mycock’s students, Jordan
Walmsley, reflects on his placement with Kirklees Council, which involved
working on projects on community engagement and regional democracy.
The theme of community engagement is picked up again in Chapter 14 by
Richard Huggins and John Kelly in their discussion of the new
Community-Based Research Initiative at Oxford Brookes University, which
builds on Huggins’ work on the Scholarship of Engagement for Politics and
his work with community groups more generally. Community-based
research is an important pillar of the scholarship of engagement in the
USA (e.g., Strand et al. 2003), and it is good to see its adoption on this side
of the Atlantic. Part III concludes with Jonathan Gorry’s account of the
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