Katie Strudwick

Academic principles versus employability pressures: a modern power struggle or a creative opportunity?

This paper considers both the difficulties and the opportunities created by the mounting political pressures on UK universities to increase the ‘employability’ of undergraduate students. Using the subject of criminology as an example, the paper considers tensions that can be created when practitioners are brought into the academy to contribute directly in the curriculum. The paper advocates that whilst such difficulties cannot be underestimated, academic engagement in this agenda can be beneficial. Using a brief example it will be argued that creative use of practitioner discourses not only empowers students in their career planning but can be used to facilitate student understanding of the links between critical theory and practice. Consideration is also given to the argument that staying out of the debate risks the marginalisation of academic influence.

Browne, employability and the rhetoric of choice: student as producer and the sustainability of HE

Abstract This paper presents a critical reflection of the rhetoric of choice offered in the current system of HE. The theoretical foundation of the discussion draws on the work of Bauman (2007) as a support for a critical stance on the implementation of the recent reviews of HE, for instance by Browne (2010) and Dearing (1997). The concept and agenda of the student as ‘producer’, versus the student as consumer or even student as commodity, are further evaluated in the context of the ‘free’ market and the apparent ‘industrialisation’ of HE, which has arguably brought graduate ‘employability’ to centre stage. The work goes on to discuss how student choice of course appears to go beyond judgments about potential job prospects. Along with this, it is argued that the values espoused by consumerism may well have a detrimental effect on the way that students develop the types of skills that employers say they want. Counteracting this, the student as producer is investigated as a means by which students become active producers of themselves as enterprising citizens, which also has benefit in respect of their future employability.

The troubling concept of class: reflecting on our ‘failure’ to encourage sociology students to re-cognise their classed locations using autobiographical methods

Abstract This paper provides a narrative of the four authors’ commitment to auto/biographical methods as teachers and researchers in ‘new’ universities. As they went about their work, they observed that, whereas students engage with the gendered, sexualised and racialised processes when negotiating their identities, they are reluctant or unable to conceptualise ‘class-ifying’ processes as key determinants of their life chances. This general inability puzzled the authors, given the students’ predominantly working-class backgrounds. Through application of their own stories, the authors explore the sociological significance of this pedagogical ‘failure’ to account for the troubling concept of class not only in the classroom but also in contemporary society.

Student as producer: undergraduate reflections on research: Examining the concept of employability in the curriculum

Abstract Student as Producer is a programme run by the University of Lincoln with the aim of increasing undergraduate engagement with original research. This paper introduces the concept of student as producer and presents the findings of an undergraduate and staff research project that examined the concept of employability as part of the undergraduate curriculum. It also includes reflections by the undergraduates involved on their experience of the project. While the majority of students accepted the importance of incorporating ‘employability’ into the curriculum, the key findings of the research were that they did not consistently identify its academic value and the majority did not recognise the transferable skills that the concept promotes.