Live Briefs and the Employability Agenda

Alison Winch and Ben LittleMedia department

What is the Employability Agenda?

• Classic New Labour idea of preparing students for competition in global knowledge economy.

• KIS (and other) data records where students end up after finishing• Transactional expectations of degrees - £9000/year gets students jobs• Degrees often expected to be professional trainings in most cases• 39 applicants for every graduate job and around 180 per graduate

scheme• Most work out of university tends to be low skilled, low paid (few

Barristers, many baristas) – Roberts (2011) Pear shaped class structure cf. Ainley and Allen (2010)

• Wolf (2011) report suggests that increasingly important for universities to equip students for competitive labour market

Problems with Employability agenda

• Degrees traditionally are awards for scholarly attainment, not professional practice

• Very narrow view of education - lose sight of intrinsic value and its role in preparing people for life as citizens, not just employees

• Linked to the marketisation and commodification of HE– Students are customers and are buying their career from us– Employability key area of competition between universities

• Often no dedicated budget for integration of employability content into curriculum at local levels or outsourced at university level (Atkins 1999)

• An over emphasis on “employability” risks a degraded educational experience or sometimes just “tick box” exercises – needs careful thought about its role in curriculum

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‘Real World Experience’

• In some areas such as medicine and nursing, teaching and professional social work degrees – real world experience in a professional context is foundational part of educational process

• In areas like media studies or business studies and indeed across traditional disciplines this is often not the case

• However work place experience is increasingly what employers (and parents) demand

• Challenge: how to work this into degrees in an educationally robust way?

Understanding MDX media students

• Very “institutionalised”: education about linear progression through qualifications

• Strategic learners• Often working class in environment where right sort of

cultural capital matters (not always disadvantage)• But ability to gain experience without getting paid does

matter a lot• Need to be “de-schooled” (Ilich 1970) – learning happening

in networks of real life relationships rather than within carefully delimited settings which teach submission to process

Slide 5

Live Briefs in Media

• Going into 3rd year of running now• Based on previous 5 years of student led live campaign work• Worked with a broad range of organisations: Oxfam, Scouts,

Refugee Action, University events, local small businesses, Friends of the Earth, New Economics Foundation and more

• Simulate a professional environment– Presenting to external clients– Pitching to a real brief– Accountable to set of agreed targets

• Encourage students to be self-managing (registers, meeting minutes, set own deadlines)

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Education and Practice

• Practice is something that has increasing importance in vocationally orientated HE

• We tend to teach practice as a collection of discrete skills in application: edit an image using this software programme, light this set, recite these lines, stitch this wound etc

• Practice is usually about relationships with others and connection in the world –useful skills not discrete (although rehearsal of skills and experience are important).

• We can offer training where we simply show a technique to students and then require them to repeat it until they can do it with near machine-like certainty or we can work on the basis that practice is an essential part of education and that:

– “Education is the practice of freedom” (Freire, 2005) – Any training must have an educative element – e.g. that it must inform the student’s

ability to be an active citizen (cf. Kerchensteiner 1911)

Experiential Learning

• Live briefs create an opportunity for a different kind of learning– Skills always developed in context– Practice is heightened by managed possibility of failure and rush of

real life success• By choosing socially engaged projects, the process involves learning the

function and application of practical skills and techniques not just their mechanics

• Also develops “soft” transferable skills– Confidence– Teamwork– Judgment– Social awareness– Independence

• Students get a sense of agency. Feel more powerful in the world – a sense of personal change and capable of effecting change

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Example Project: Intern Aware

• Year 1:– Campaign at Middlesex run over a week– Students designed and managed stalls

across campus– 1500+ signatures to petition calling for end to

unpaid internships

• Year 2:– Repeat previous years campaign on mdx to

enable students to understand previous year’s work

– Students plan, manage and carry out extension of campaign across 5 universities across London

– Over 4000 signatures over course of a week– Presented to Vince Cable in run up to

successful vote in parliament calling for a cap of 4 weeks on unpaid internships

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Advertising, PR and Media

• Level 5 ‘Media for Advertising and Marketing’: 150 students • 4 external organisations (Elite Telesales, Scouts, Refugee

Action, Fusion Hair Salon) and the North London Literary Festival

• Each organisation gave a live brief to students (one for each seminar)

• Students worked in teams on a competitive basis creating an advertising/marketing campaign in response to the brief.

• They pitched their campaign to the external organisation. The winning team either went on to develop the campaign or were given work placements.

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Team Work

• Team work was an integral part of the learning process. The students formed themselves into teams and each member took on a role from an advertising agency: Account Manager, Creative Director etc

• Team work was explained as simulating the work place • Particularly suited to experiential learning: making meaning

from our experience is relational process and thrives on dialogue and listening – a collective emerges through sharing (Jordi 2011)

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Kolb’s Learning Cycle

• We entered Kolb’s cycle (1984) at abstract conceptualisation. After the students were given the brief we brainstormed ideas and I outlined theories around advertising campaigns. We also discussed the needs of the organisation. Tested implications of concepts in new situations (theoretical frames and brief)

• Concrete experience – developing the campaign and pitch• Observations and reflections (feedback from organisations,

tutor and critical essay)

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E-learning

• Technology enabled the project in a number of ways:

1. Brainstorming (videos of Dragon’s Den/ information on Virtual Learning Environment/ Prezi)

2. Web 2.0 enhanced learning: information about previous campaigns and the industry from the internet

3. Social media e.g. Facebook, email was essential for the groups to communicate with each other and me.

4. Creativity (m-learning): making videos/ story boards / pitch (prezi/powerpoint)

5. Digital marketing campaigns

6. The students’ critical reflection involved e-submission and they received feedback through VLE (Gordon, 2014).

7. This year change critical reflection to video.

08/04/23Slide 13

The Results

• Some of the pitches were excellent. • Experiential learning (student feedback/critical reflection)• Work placements at Refugee Action, Scouts, Elite (‘life

changing’)• Developed campaigns for North London Literary Festival and

Fusion Salon • Atkins critiques the employability agenda. Particularly he

argues that it’s not financially realistic. Applied for budget… (Nicky Torrance)

• Flexibility that includes both ‘training the mind’ and fitting students for the ‘real world’ (Atkins, 1999)

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Limits to Live Student Projects

• Giving students freedom important

• But they also crave structure

• Balance between independence and guidance

• Easy to get wrong in either direction

• Too much freedom they got lost

• Too much instruction they don’t own the project

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Exercise 1

• Think about organisations you could partner with in your subject area:– What work do they do that an influx of

inexperienced but enthusiastic students could help with?

– Are there relationships in place already?– Are they time/cash rich? Probably not. How can

you suggest a project that would be mutually beneficial and work to help them overcome their limitations

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Exercise 2

• Think of a module you could apply a live project to– What sort of project could meet the learning outcomes?– How will it fit with assessment? (remember changes to

assessment are often automatically considered major changes and thus could push programmes to review/revalidation)

– How could you make significant space for a live project on the module without compromising the curriculum?

– What extra resources might you need? (rooms, admin assistance, extra staffing, consumables)

08/04/23Slide 17

References

• Pat Ainley and Martin Allen (2010) Lost Generation• Ken Roberts (2011) Class in Contemporary Britain 2nd Edition• Alison Wolf (2011) The Wolf Report• Ivan Ilich (1970) Deschooling• Kerchensteiner (1911) Education for Citizenship• Paolo Freire (2005) Pedagogy of the Oppressed • Atkins, M.J. 1999. Oven-ready and Self-basting: Taking Stock of

Employability Skills. Teaching in Higher Education vol 4 no. 2 pp. 267-280.

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Oxfam Video

• http://vimeo.com/70016403

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