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

Rethinking Placement Learning for Politics and International Relations
Hence there is prima facie evidence that the general limitations and
problems with sandwich courses and extended placement activities will
affect the use of this pedagogical tool in the teaching and learning of
politics and international relations.
Rethinking placement learning
The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics project developed a new
approach to the pedagogy of placement learning in order to significantly
redress, if not entirely overcome, the above problems and limitations. By
contrast to the standard practice in politics departments and universities
more generally across the British Isles, we developed an approach to
placement learning around the following elements: our placements were
short, embedded in modules and adopted a research-based approach to
learning.
Our placements ranged from five to sixteen days in duration and
were scheduled in a variety of ways, from one to three straight weeks on a
full-time basis to one to two days a week across three to eight weeks; but
some placements were arranged on a more ad hoc basis, with the student
attending certain key events and proceedings. The common element within
this variety of placement schedules was that placements took place within
the academic year. The vast majority of the placements were located close
to the universities, enabling students to move between their place of study
and the location of their placement with ease and at little cost, and
establishing the potential for placement activities to inform academic
studies and vice versa.
Our placements were embedded in a number of respects. They were
embedded in the curriculum in the sense that they took place within the
academic year, usually in term time; they were linked to level-two modules
of study (at Coventry University and the University of Warwick these were
modules on British politics or the EU, with their own content, rather than
‘empty’ modules designed to assess a placement or project); and were
assessed by the universities, with the marks awarded constituting or
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