Live briefs
Okay we have a breakthrough!
One of my colleagues suggested that the work I’ve been doing on live briefs is perfectly aligned to the ARP objectives and would be a great place to put it.
Reflecting on my work since she suggested it has reminded me it is a significant piece of work that has been part of my role for the last few years.
It hasn’t always been, and in fact I’m in the process of re-writing my job description and re-grading my job through the HERA process. Switching over from a support staff contract to an academic one. it does feel slightly odd that my role has always involved teaching but has mostly been considered support. Probably because of two things:
The team I sit within (Careers & Employability)
Initially it wasn’t conceived of as a teaching role
I’ve always had incredible support from my team, and that has meant that I’ve had a level of autonomy and trust to have ideas and test and pursue them. To tweak and respond to students needs alongside my own and work in a way that gets the best out of my brain – on the most part.
I’ve moved around a little bit in my team (maternity cover – fixed term contracts – permanent – now rewriting my role) but I feel closest to something that makes sense now than I have done before.
I started having conversations around the need to embed enterprise experiences into the curriculum in the same way as we do employability probably 4 years ago know after switching over from the enterprise team to the employability team.
To be clear I think the binary of Enterprise and Employability being separate is a created separation that is much more of a blurry line in reality and in delivery. But the way our team was organised the enterprise provision was largely extracurricular and the employability focus was more embedded. I’d always wondered why? and think in part it was just a natural evolution of a team growing like a start-up from 2 people to now 20+ – I’ve lost count. Rather than a decision made strategically early on. Don’t quote me on that though, I could be wrong. I acknowledged that it was problematic to have all the enterprise learning be extracurricular, because as we know there are various barriers to accessing extracurricular activities. So essentially if I oversimplify slightly we were only offering enterprise learning to students without any barriers who could access it outside of their taught time. And that’s a huge problem. There is already plenty of research to support this so I’m not looking to explore that as my ARP, but it’s worth noting because it shows up in my design and teaching methods, which likely will feature in my ARP.
I realised there was a real gap in enterprise education designed into the role I inherited. Which came with lots of already booked sessions and pre-prepared slide decks. So I started to do more of this enterprise teaching in my role, slowly at first. Whilst also thinking a lot about how to do that in a way that is accessible. Partly, I imagine sub subconsciously because of how much of my own education I had found wildly inaccessible. I started exploring live briefs, feeling it out and finding my feet as I went. Tweaking, reiterating, and redesigning with each one.
Fast forward to now and this offer has grown and shifted significantly, it was acknowledged as a focus for our team strategy which felt quite monumental to me, especially given a few years ago it didn’t exist in our team at all, and the format and value proposition didn’t exist anywhere in the university. Or at least as far as my team and I can identify. I’d just been sort of been beavering away at it and that acknowledgment felt quite monumental for me. As did the addition of a budget specifically for this area of work.
Ruth who suggested this be my area of focus also has some great insights around it on her blog over here too. Thank you Ruth!
Author:, L.M., Wakefield, L. and Holmes, H. (no date) ‘why won’t they engage in extra-curricular opportunities?’, ‘Why won’t they engage in extra-curricular opportunities?’ | Advance HE. Available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/news-and-views/why-wont-they-engage-extra-curricular-opportunities (Accessed: 01 January 2024).