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Vol. 17 No. 4 (2020)

Published: 2 February 2020

Articles

  • Editorial 17.4: Advancing Non-placement Work-integrated Learning Across the Degree

    Bonnie Dean, Michelle J Eady, Venkata Yanamandram

    Work-integrated learning (WIL) is on the rise as many universities adopt strategic targets for student workplace preparation as an element of their tertiary studies. Through WIL, students gain real world experiences, transferable skills and build professional networks. WIL is often understood as a placement activity, whereby students spend extended periods of time in industry, typically at the end or near end of their degree. These placements are designed to encapsulate the theoretical learning of a degree through the opportunity to apply knowledge and practise skills in a physical workplace. While there is much evidence in the higher education teaching and learning scholarship that attests to the benefits of placement-based WIL for all stakeholders, innovation in WIL that integrates work practices with learning is also occurring without time on placement or within a workplace. In recent years, WIL activity has extended beyond limited conceptions as describing only placements, to include a range of simulated, virtual, authentic and industry-based activities. The uptake of non-placement learning activities presents as opportunity to investigate the benefits, utility and innovation of this growing pedagogy to contribute meaningful insights to higher education scholarship and practice. This special issue is being published during the trials of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) emergency. This global pandemic has shattered economies, touching every domain of life, including completely disrupting higher education. The call for papers for this special issue was conceived and advertised well before the universal lock down. There was evidence to suggest universities were exploring and experimenting with new ways of engaging with industry partners and that these models were offering extraordinary benefits to student learning and application of knowledge. The COVID-19 situation escalated these experiments, determining virtual WIL and projects or activities leveraged through technological platforms, as the fortuitous survivors. There is no doubt that WIL pedagogies and programs have been hit hard, however, this hardship for some has been described as cause for a learning revolution. For WIL research, this could be the impetus for questioning dominant modes of WIL and extending our understandings and knowledge of the impact of alternative WIL models.

    Read article: Editorial 17.4: Advancing Non-placement Work-integrated Learning Across the Degree

  • Work-integrated Learning and Skill Development in a Master of Public Health Program: Graduate Perspectives

    Sue Durham, Helen Jordan, Lucio Naccarella, Melissa Russell

    It is increasingly understood that work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunities are critical in providing graduating students with employability skills which allow them to gain employment and effectively operate in work environments. This is particularly relevant within degrees such as public health that cut across very diverse fields of practice. Little research has previously investigated student perceptions post-graduation of skill development within public health degrees. This investigation aimed to identify the range of skills gained within a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree which graduates felt assisted them to obtain employment, and to determine the teaching and learning approaches that contributed to the development of these skills. Graduates responding to a questionnaire self-reported that they had good levels of both technical and employability skills especially in the domains: Informed Decision Making, Professional Practice and Standards, Lifelong Learning and Collaboration. Students agreed that there were frequent opportunities for applied learning and enablers to employment within their degree. However, graduates indicated that the employability domain: Commencement Readiness and confidence at point of graduation, could be strengthened. The implications of this research for the development of non-placement WIL experiences, capstone subjects, the overall curriculum and broader university student experience are discussed.

    Read article: Work-integrated Learning and Skill Development in a Master of Public Health Program: Graduate Perspectives

  • Building Professional Competencies Through a Service Learning ‘Gallery Walk’ in Primary School Teacher Education

    Sarita Ramsaroop, Nadine Petersen

    This article reports on a service learning project in a South African primary school teacher education programme, as experiential and practice-based pedagogy in a social studies methods course. We aimed to broaden understanding of service learning as a form of non-placement work-integrated learning for the development of teacher professional competencies. Student teachers drew on topics in the middle school social studies curriculum and incorporated Indigenous geographical elements with local community history in the design of a service learning ‘gallery walk’ for Grade 5 learners. Using a generic qualitative design, data were generated from students’ and teachers’ reflective journals, lesson plans, photographs and video recordings. It was analysed for common content themes and prominent discourse markers of students’ developing professional knowledge and competencies. The findings provide evidence of deepened student learning, particularly on the influence of context and curriculum differentiation and how their struggles with group work enabled the development of collaboration and co-operation required by professionals. In addition, the service learning prompted changing notions of citizenship and reciprocity of learning.

    Read article: Building Professional Competencies Through a Service Learning ‘Gallery Walk’ in Primary School Teacher Education

  • The Impact of Prior Work-Experience on Student Learning Outcomes in Simulated Internships

    Leopold Bayerlein

    In this paper, the extent to which a compulsory non-placement work-integrated learning (WIL) activity, in the form of a simulated internship, in an Australian undergraduate accounting program, created learning outcomes for students with different levels of prior work-experience is assessed. The paper extends prior, theoretically based literature by providing an exploratory evaluation of the experiences of students undertaking a specific simulated internship. This evaluation is important because it enables students and higher education providers to evaluate the extent to which a simulation is likely to meet the learning needs and expectations of individual students and student groups. Despite the critical importance of such an evaluation, prior literature has thus far focused on theoretically based evaluations and comparisons of simulated internships, with empirical evidence being largely absent from the literature. Using a series of semi-structured interviews with students, the current paper shows that the evaluated simulation was generally able to develop cognitive, skill-based, and affective learning outcomes, and that students’ learning outcomes were strongly influenced by their prior real-world work-experience. In addition, the paper also shows that the lived experiences of students within the simulation were much more multifaceted and diverse than anticipated in the prior literature. The findings of this paper are relevant for higher education providers and students planning to undertake a simulated internship, or other non-placement WIL activity. Potential challenges and opportunities for different groups of students arising in the analysed simulation are identified and discussed.

    Read article: The Impact of Prior Work-Experience on Student Learning Outcomes in Simulated Internships

  • ‘Putting on a Show’ Non-Placement WIL in the Performing Arts: Documenting Professional Rehearsal And Performance Using Eportfolio Reflections

    Narelle Yeo, Jennifer Rowley

    his study explores the utility of employing a student-created experiential narrative ePortfolio as a multi-modal tool for reflective practice in WIL. It does so by examining a case study situated within the performing arts, where WIL discourses are rarely adopted, and few examples are present in the literature. This paper introduces a circular mentoring framework that extends Kolb’s experiential learning model, whereby learning is facilitated through the interchange of roles through rehearsal and reflection. In this study, participants prepared and performed an opera in a professional venue over a five-day period of intense creative studio work. The 2017 and 2018 Inclusion Project is an innovative teaching and learning opportunity that offered authentic industry-based experience to undergraduate music students in a closely monitored, non-placement WIL setting. Participants (n=18) undertaking a semester long elective, reported their experience through online journaling in an ePortfolio allowing them to create narrative responses. A qualitative analysis using narrative inquiry on the ePortfolio reflections indicated a direct benefit for student’s career readiness as creative artists.

    Read article: ‘Putting on a Show’ Non-Placement WIL in the Performing Arts: Documenting Professional Rehearsal And Performance Using Eportfolio Reflections

  • An Institutional Framework for Scaffolding Work-Integrated Learning Across a Degree

    Bonnie Dean, Venkata Yanamandram, Michelle J Eady, Tracey Moroney, Nuala O'Donnell, Tracey Glover-Chambers

    Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) is an important pedagogical strategy for developing employability skills by immersing students in real-world understandings, applications and practices. Increasingly, universities are focusing on how WIL can be scaffolded across a degree, to involve students in a variety of WIL activities in order to apply disciplinary knowledge and skills. While placement models appear to be the dominant mode of WIL that are easily recognised within a degree structure, non-placement forms of WIL while emerging, remain less visible. This conceptual paper presents an institutional framework that accounts for a range of placement and non-placement WIL activities, to make WIL practices overt across a degree. It introduces the Work-Integrated Learning Curriculum Classification (WILCC) Framework that supports a university-wide approach for developing, mapping and reporting WIL. The WILCC Framework promotes the visibility of WIL across the institution, offers a common language for WIL across disciplines, and provides a tool to scaffold WIL experiences throughout degree programs.

    Read article: An Institutional Framework for Scaffolding Work-Integrated Learning Across a Degree

  • Evaluating Alternative Work-Integrated Learning Opportunities: Student Perceptions of Interdisciplinary Industry-Based Projects

    Melanie Hayes, Leela Cejnar

    Industry and Community Project Units (ICPU) are a work-integrated learning (WIL) initiative designed to provide an interdisciplinary, project-based experience for students based on real-world industry problems. With any new program, reflecting on the course delivery is essential for future quality improvement. Brookfield (2017) has suggested many student-centred approaches through which we can reflect on teaching practice, including Letters to Successors, whereby current students reflect on their experience and provide guidance for surviving and thriving the course, in a letter to future students. This study aimed to analyse the anonymous Letters to Successors penned by four separate ICPU cohorts, to understand students’ perceptions of undertaking interdisciplinary, industry-based projects. The text within the Letters to Successors was analysed adopting a thematic analysis, using a realist and inductive approach. Four key themes were identified in the letters: working with others, focusing on tasks, having fun, and the unique experience. The students were overwhelmingly positive in describing their experience and were grateful for the opportunity to participate in a unit unlike others in their degree programs. Many of the skills and behaviours the students attributed to success align with the transferable skills required to develop their employability; this demonstrates the value of this non-placement WIL initiative as an alternative for traditionally lengthy placements or internships that can be burdensome for both student and industry. Further research to expand our findings, or to alternatively explore the views of staff and industry partners, would be valuable in ongoing evaluations of interdisciplinary, industry-based projects as an alternative model of WIL.

    Read article: Evaluating Alternative Work-Integrated Learning Opportunities: Student Perceptions of Interdisciplinary Industry-Based Projects

  • Being on Country as Protest: Designing a Virtual Geography Fieldtrip Guided by Jindaola

    Jennifer Atchison, Jade Kennedy

    The fieldtrip has long been a key component of the geography curriculum, described as a ‘touchstone’ for learning in, on and about place. Learning on Country provides an opportunity to embody Indigenous knowledges and experience places and people in field classes. However, such opportunities are increasingly under threat as the costs and risks of running field trips have risen, and more recently, faced challenges such as those presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe the transformation of a third-year undergraduate geography field trip into a virtual field trip using online resources. We reflect on the processes and challenges of doing so in ways that privilege and respect Aboriginal pedagogies and practices in educational design. Drawing on the philosophies and frameworks of Jindaola, an Aboriginal way of embedding Indigenous knowledges into the curriculum, we show how the virtual field trip, as a form of non-placement work-integrated learning, can embed place-based experiential learning into online learning contexts. This paper outlines how the design, articulation and practice of that process is grounded in Country, culture and customs.

    Read article: Being on Country as Protest: Designing a Virtual Geography Fieldtrip Guided by Jindaola

  • Projects of Consequence: Interdisciplinary WIL Projects Designed to Meet the Needs of Partners and Students

    Leanne Piggott, Theresa Winchester-Seeto

    The focus of this paper is the design and development of an innovative project-based work-integrated learning (WIL) course that enables undergraduate students from all faculties to work in interdisciplinary teams with partner organisations from the public, private, and community sectors. Projects are co-designed with partners interested in students from multiple disciplines bringing insights to problems that might not otherwise be resourced by their organisation. These ‘projects of consequence’ are unstructured, ambiguous and complex, requiring student teams to synthesise their different disciplinary knowledge. Student learning is supported by course curriculum design that includes proven pedagogical practices such as: ongoing feedback from partners; students working in autonomous small teams; academic supervision of teamwork; learning support before and during project work; debriefing; providing a safe, supportive space to experiment with new ideas, embracing the prospect of failure and to develop resilience; all underpinned by reflection so as to process, understand and integrate students’ experiences. The versatility of the course design was demonstrated by the rapid change from face-to-face delivery to an entirely online learning environment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The challenges and adaptations include changes to the way student teams worked, the additional support needed by students, and adjustment in the mode of interactions with partners.

    Read article: Projects of Consequence: Interdisciplinary WIL Projects Designed to Meet the Needs of Partners and Students

  • Non-Placement WIL: The Case of an Exercise Prescription Clinic

    Lynette Hodges, Andrew Martin

    Universities globally have continued to strategically increase work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunities for students to enhance graduate employability. However, meeting the needs of the increasing number of placements in industry settings places challenges on employers and academic programme coordinators. This paper examines an innovative teaching and learning initiative demonstrating non-placement WIL practice on-campus and online through an exercise prescription clinic (EPC). The benefits provided by these opportunities have not only been for student learning, but for clients, in particular those impacted by neurological and/or muscular skeletal problems. The development of the on-campus EPC has focused on key elements of good practice in WIL highlighted by Agnew, Pill and Orrell (2017). The recent Covid-19 pandemic and the related government restrictions have resulted in the on-campus EPC being flipped online, requiring adaptability and flexibility of both students and clients. This paper reinforces the importance of developing WIL experiences that enhance the learning outcomes for both the student and the client. It also highlights the transferability of authentic industry non-placement WIL clinical experiences for future health professionals to both on-campus and online settings, which enable students the opportunity to engage with a range of clients in a safe environment, enhancing both personal and professional learning outcomes.

    Read article: Non-Placement WIL: The Case of an Exercise Prescription Clinic

  • ‘'Workplace’ or Workforce: What Are We Preparing Students For?

    Theresa Winchester-Seeto, Leanne Piggott

    This Position Paper explores some of the assumptions that underpin the dependence on physical WIL placements. The authors focus on the fundamental question of what exactly we are preparing students for – is it the workplace, or should we think more broadly about preparing students for the workforce? This raises other questions around the necessity of students undertaking placements in a physical workplace to learn what they need, as well as analysing what aspects of work trigger learning. Workplaces in many organisations are quite different to those of a decade ago, requiring different skills of their workers, and for some, there is no single physical workplace at all. Preparing students for this new paradigm requires us to rethink what kind of WIL experience will be most efficacious and potentially opens space for consideration of other options such as virtual WIL, project-based WIL, studio learning, and student designed start-ups. It is hoped that our thoughts and recommendations might challenge how academics and practitioners currently think about and deliver WIL, with a view to advancing new approaches to non-placement WIL.

    Read article: ‘'Workplace’ or Workforce: What Are We Preparing Students For?

  • Counselling Placements Caught up in the Mismatch of Standards And Realities: Lessons From COVID-19

    Sonam Pelden, Vicki Banham

    As the fear of mortality struck humanity, a new age dawned in the relational styles, processes, and interactions amongst people. COVID-19 has caused a major shift in the educational landscape. While most teaching and learning activities moved online, field placement units which are fully invested in industry engagement, and once highly sought, came to a dramatic pause. For students, this produced uncertainty around completion of their degrees and for institutions who became entangled in the changing requirements of accrediting bodies as they grappled with the changing landscape. Our final year counselling and psychotherapy students on placement were instructed to retreat from their placements while some ‘lucky few’ joined the drifting warriors working from the safety of their homes with their assigned agencies. Crisis and contemporary times call for openness and innovation grounded in practical wisdom. But the tyranny of COVID-19 times highlighted a growing gap between professional standards and community realities. This paper alludes to the struggles of counselling postgraduate University students on placement who are caught up in the mismatch between professional standards of accreditation bodies and the emerging community expectations and practices. It draws on literature to highlight the impact of historic controversial discourses involving online counselling and face-to-face counselling on current practices. This paper aims to reflect on lessons dispensed by COVID-19 to the professional bodies and universities in order to work together in creating innovative, non-placement work-integrated learning (WIL) practices that reflect the realities within the current landscape.

    Read article: Counselling Placements Caught up in the Mismatch of Standards And Realities: Lessons From COVID-19

  • Ensuring Equitable Work-Integrated Learning Opportunities for International Students

    Lesley Andrew

    Ensuring equitable work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunities for international students can be problematic. This position paper explores this challenge within the context of the Master of Public Health course (MPH) in Australian universities. The availability and accessibility of placement and non-placement WIL for international students are examined through a desktop audit of MPH offerings across 27 public Australian universities. These findings, interpreted through the lens of cultural, social and financial capital suggest although international students stand to benefit more from WIL than their domestic peers, their opportunity to participate is lower. The paper argues a strength-based approach is needed to mitigate this issue of inequity. Suggestions are offered to improve equity in placement and non-placement WIL for international students.

    Read article: Ensuring Equitable Work-Integrated Learning Opportunities for International Students