Conceptualising routes to employability in higher education: the case of education studies

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to critical understandings of the significance of employability in current debates about the transformation of Higher Education (HE). We express our concerns about the implications of orientating HE to utilitarian demands in the light of a tendency to align discussions about the significance of studying at university with the idea of employability. The research underlying this article explores how the experience of UK university students in the context of education studies programmes shapes their conceptions of employability and their understanding of their subject of study. Ideas developed by Gert Biesta are used as a framework to discuss different forms in which thoughts about employability are articulated. The analysis of data that includes reflections on the experience of placement suggests that tensions between education as training for teachers and education as the possibility for change, point to the emergence of a new form of understanding employability that may have to work the boundary between both. We argue that lessons learnt from the case of education studies can be useful to other subjects and programmes of study that also share an interest in the theoretical study of a discipline or where a narrow career expectation is being challenged by broader possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Employability
• education studies
• higher education
• teaching

Acknowledgement

We are immensely grateful to Will Curtis, Jane Bates, Jane McDonnell, Sue Lewis and all the students and participants for their work on the project. We thank Sam Sellar, Tony Brown, Edda Sant, Ricardo Nemirovsky and the anonymous reviewers whose comments have greatly improved this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Higher Education Academy [Collaborative Grant Scheme/ GENTDG91].

Notes on contributors

David Menendez Alvarez-Hevia

David Menendez Alvarez-Hevia is Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has been involved in teaching, leading, and developing different Undergraduate and Master programmes in the area of education. He is interested in understanding educational issues from a theoretical and socio-political perspective, combining critical and philosophical lenses to approach education in its wider sense. Over the last few years, David has shown a special sensitivity to the problems associated to the marketisation of Higher Education. In this line, some of his latest research projects focus on the exploration of ideas associated to employability, attendance and internationalisation.

Steven Naylor

Steven Naylor is senior lecturer and programme lead for Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has a key role in developing the Education Studies course in the changing nature of the landscape of Education as a discipline. His interest is in understanding the range of places and contexts in which education takes place. He pays particular attention to the shifts in students’ expectations and understandings of their role as educational thinkers and professionals.