Abstract
In the current theory and practice of politics work placements in the UK a great deal of emphasis is placed on lengthy placements and the cultivation of ‘key’ or ‘transferable skills’. This article presents an alternative model of short research-based placements, which provides tangible benefits for students of politics in terms of both employability and personal development, and which gels with recent attempts to provide a richer account of the nature of employability.
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Notes
The project team comprised Barrie Axford, Richard Huggins and Kim Francis (website developer) at Oxford Brookes University; Caroline Gibson (project manager) and Philippa Sherrington (project director) at the University of Warwick; and Alasdair Blair and the author, both then at Coventry University. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of HEFCE, which funded the project through its Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (project no: FDTL 16/03). The author can be seen discussing the model of placement learning developed by the project in the short film Innovations in the Teaching and Learning of Politics, (dir. Rose Gann), available at www.politicsatuniversity.com/innovations.html.
Brunel also offers what it calls a ‘thin sandwich’, which actually adopts a club sandwich formation, with two smaller layers of work experience between three slices of university-based learning.
It is tempting to insert a hyphen between ‘placement’ and ‘learning’ in this instance, to emphasise the close symbiosis, just as service-learning is usually hyphenated in the United States (Eyler and Giles, 1999), although whether the connection between service and learning is achieved in practice is a moot point (see Zivi, 1997).
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Curtis, S. Politics Placements and Employability: A New Approach. Eur Polit Sci 11, 153–163 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2011.17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2011.17