[Dawn Bennett]

I love these examples! Colleague Nicoleta Maynard was over at Queens last year and brought back so many ideas. Although we have a similar program in 1st year, the challenge is to keep this going throughout the program.

Amanda, how did you get staff on board for program-wide implementation – did you need to formalise the changes, and to address accreditation needs at the same time?

[Dawn Bennett]

I love these examples! Colleague Nicoleta Maynard was over at Queens last year and brought back so many ideas. Although we have a similar program in 1st year, the challenge is to keep this going throughout the program.

Amanda, how did you get staff on board for program-wide implementation – did you need to formalise the changes, and to address accreditation needs at the same time?

[Dawn Bennett]

http://imgur.com/lt50CDWLiteracies for life Right click to open image

• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Dawn Bennett.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Dawn Bennett.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Dawn Bennett.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Dawn Bennett.

[Dawn Bennett]

Employability is the means to create and sustain a meaningful life and work for the benefit of oneself and others

[Dawn Bennett]

Good Practice in Relation to Education for Employability

An Education for Employability Curriculum

Involves adopting an approach to employability education that demonstrates:

• Inclusiveness, ethics and respect
• Embeddedness and integration of employability – across the curricula (including embedding employability into WIL, experiential learning, capstones, student assessment, co-curricular activities)
• Explicitly talking with students, staff and industry about employability and how it works in the curriculum
• Clarity of language and purpose around employability
• Evaluation of employability aspects of curricula
• Being expansive and collaborative (i.e. going beyond the core discipline to allow and provide for broader links with other disciplines, industry partners and communities of practice)
• Including both generic and discipline-relevant aspects of learning for employability
• Quality standards
• Scaffolding of learning/development
• Focussing on learning for both life and work

Note: these components of employability curricula reflect what it means to be employable and what we hope our graduates gain (or improve) from their education

Achieving Education for Employability

This requires, and is enhanced by:

• Cross university buy in
• Planning, policies and guidelines
• Champions and leadership encouragement
• Support and resourcing (including people, funding and infrastructure)
• Scalability, feasibility and sustainability
• Rewards and recognition

Terms that could be used
Employability
Career development learning
Learning for life and work
Contributing to a growth (not fixed) mindset
21st Century Capabilities

Follow up actions to be pursued by the group
1. Friday – report to HERDSA
2. Provide into to ALTF political initiatives
3. Share through websites (e.g. EPEN http://www.epen.edu.au
4. Ongoing work of the Good Practices for Employability discussion group

[Dawn Bennett]

Hi Amanda, is there anything on the CICO approach that we could see or read about? Do you think that we could share the fact sheet, for example? It would be really helpful to think about whether this could be integrated into an existing curriculum / unit – might it work (to a lesser extent) just in one unit of study?

At USC, has there been any opposition bv students? If so, how has it been managed?

[Dawn Bennett]

Thanks Amanda, I just re-read the paper and would like to raise three key points for discussion and comment – it would be great to bring together the expertise on these.

First, a collaborative governance framework is truly collaborative! Students are the essential element and they need to be included from the start. Alongside this come shared values and purpose as well as a shared understanding about what employability is. My question is, how we come to this shared understanding? Does anyone have examples of where this is already in place?

The next point links back to students as partners. Engaging all students is always a challenge. This is where assessment comes in, particularly using David Boud’s emphasis on assessment that credits both higher-order thinking and situated, ‘doing’ activities. I would love to see examples of best practice so that we might be able to roll these out more broadly.

The third point is that work-based learning, which Amanda and Francesca define as for-credit learning and teaching strategies that occur in real-world contexts and are properly supervised, need to be written into institutional processes and structures. For this to be effective, simplistic understandings of WIL need to be overcome. How we create better understandings of WIL and employability, particularly when the government takes a simplistic view? are there examples we could all follow?

[Dawn Bennett]

Amanda Henderson shared with me a collaborative governance framework, and I think it is really applicable here. In particular, she emphasises three stakeholder cohorts – university, industry and students. Students are often the missing piece of the puzzle, and their involvement is central to the CMO debate. Here is a link to the paper – it’s really interesting stuff! Collaborative governance framework

[Dawn Bennett]

Fascinating! I suspect that this isn’t a linear relationship and that the interplay is dependent on a number of variables. If we positioned assessment, for example, as a vehicle through which to embed employability (read meta-cognition), the assessment piece might act as an anchor and enable the survival of employability when context changes. This is very much food for thought, and I would be interested in mapping the model against one or more whole-of-program employability initiatives. Breakfast with Margaret is dangerous – it leads to multiple new ideas, disruptions and interests…

[Dawn Bennett]

I would add that many academic staff do not know how their modules/units fit into a course/program. This is particularly the case for casual/sessional staff. My Course map would be really useful for teachers.

From the student perspective I would love to see how students might map their self and career literacies across their programs. Lisa, do you see scope for us to map the model against a program and use this to see where “employability” is developed? It would be terrific.

This morning, Margaret and I had breakfast and we were sharing examples of where course cohesion began to fray at the edges. Logically, a map might indicate where each element fits and also the impact of removing things.

[Dawn Bennett]

Thanks Lisa. I know you are looking at My Course Map as a curriculum-wide change tool. What challenges re you facing with this at the moment?

[Dawn Bennett]

Thank you both! I hadn’t thought of WIL in that way, either. One of the big things for me is that effective WIL must be scaffolded before, during and afterwards so that students make meaning of their experiences. Stephen Billett’s framework makes this really clear. The ‘making meaning’ process brings everything together. I have also long pushed for academic WIL as a CDL expectation of academic roles. It would be great to see this.

Margaret, do you think there is value in communicating employability to senior management/decision makers as a course cohesion driver – as a driver rather than an element?

[Dawn Bennett]

Thanks Margaret! I downloaded the presentation to iTunes and put it on my phone, so I can now listen to it in the car. This might be useful for other people as well. Dawn

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