Experiencing Politics in Action: Widening Participation in Placement Learning and Politics as a Vocation

Abstract

Inspired by the work of Ernest Boyer and the Boyer Commission, the Scholarship of Engagement for Politics project was an attempt to adapt their demands for research-based undergraduate learning opportunities to the British context through the pedagogy of placement learning. This article explores the project's attempts to make placement learning more socially inclusive through the development of short, research-based and predominantly local placements that are open to all students, including those with family commitments and part-time jobs, and that are fully embedded in the political science curriculum. The project found that such placements enriched students' understanding of politics and both complemented and reinforced their studies on campus. There were also unexpected benefits in terms of enhancing their appreciation of political actors and processes along with their sense of personal efficacy and interest in a range of possible careers in politics. A number of students used their first experiences of politics as stepping stones to further internships and ultimately employment in politics and government. And most students reported that their placement experiences had given them a renewed respect for political activity by opening their eyes to politics at the local level and the nonpartisan work of great value that political actors engage in on a day-to-day basis.

Keywords:

• experiential learning
• placement learning
• political education
• research-based learning
• the scholarship of engagement
• undergraduate research

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Political Studies Association Learning and Teaching Conference “Teaching Democracy: Youth, Citizenship and Political Science Education” at Royal Holloway, University of London, September 3–4, 2008. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which funded the research on which this article is based through its Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (project no. FDTL 16/03). We are very grateful to the other members of the project team: Barrie Axford, Caroline Gibson, Richard Huggins, and Philippa Sherrington. Special thanks must go to the 36 students and 18 placement providers whose experiences formed the basis of this research. We are also grateful for the helpful comments of an anonymous reviewer on how to better marshal our evidence.

Notes

Source: Adapted from Curtis 2009 and Curtis et al. 2010, 36.

It is refreshing to find Edward Zlotkowski using the phrase to refer to the activities of individual students in service-learning programs in the United States (2005, ix).

Over the last decade or so, it has become popular in the United Kingdom to refer to universities' engagement with outside bodies and organizations as “third-stream activity” to distinguish it from teaching and traditional notions of research. Although third-stream work is often dressed up in the language of community engagement, the focus is almost always on income generation. But for an alternative reading of the tradition of British higher education that identifies a clear emphasis with social improvement and the addressing of community concerns, see John Annette (2005).

Indeed, the new British government minister for universities David Willetts has recently suggested that each degree program should publish online an “employability statement” setting out how it will enhance students' career prospects (Willetts 2010). Although addressing this agenda was not a central concern of our project, we nonetheless discovered significant benefits from research-based placements in terms of employability (see Curtis 2009).

Despite the fact that politics is no longer taught in British universities as something that occurs primarily in the Houses of Parliament, we discovered following our first round of placements that a second-year student who we placed with a major NGO saw its activity as largely apolitical. In subsequent preplacement briefings, we introduced a session discussing the nature of politics in an effort to explore broader definitions of the term. As a number of commentators have pointed out, with less obviously political placements it may be necessary to “direct students' attention to organizational priorities and challenges and also to policy issues connected with the organization's mission” (Colby et al. 2007, 238; see also Bernstein 2009, 3).

We used the U.K. Political Studies Association's Directory of Politics Departments to identify and contact relevant heads of departments. We excluded departments listed in the directory for which placements might fall under the category of years abroad on language programs, such as European Studies departments. Therefore the departments we identified used placements on Politics, International Relations, and closely related courses but excluded Public Policy and Public Administration courses. We also excluded all co-curricular and extracurricular activities, due to our focus on the harnessing of placements for the teaching and learning of politics and our concern to embed such activities in the political science curriculum.

The two exceptions are Leeds Metropolitan University's Active Politics module, involving a one-week placement, and the University of Northumbria that links placements to its Applied Political Research module. Both modules are in the second year of three-year degree programs.

However, in another sense our approach is less empowering than the sandwich model and the work-placement module, as we removed from our students' hands their ability to choose, to negotiate, and to control their placements due to our focus on learning rather than employability. We fully recognize that writing letters of application to placement providers and negotiating placement-learning opportunities are valuable aspects of sandwich degrees and work-placement modules and we in no way claim that our approach should be mutually exclusive from the others. Indeed, it is possible to think of our approach as an intermediate approach. Our students have to complete an application form and occasionally provide CVs, which they submitted to the project team and which were often kicked back to them with suggestions for improvement, thereby better preparing them for completing “real” application forms in the future. Interestingly, very few of the placement providers wished to see application forms and CVs or even meet, let alone interview, students prior to the start of placements.

With the scandal that erupted over the expense claims of British Members of Parliament shortly after the end of our project, our research suggests that placements and internships have an important role to play in rebuilding the trust of young people in the political institutions that govern them.