Projects

Virtual Work Placement for Undergraduate History Students

Description

Round 6 Teaching Development Grant

A minority of History departments offer placements in the history and heritage sector to undergraduate students to develop their skills and experience for employability.

The University of Northampton is one of these, and intends to continue with voluntary placements in record offices, libraries, archives, libraries, and heritage sites. However, many students do not take up a placement despite its demonstrable benefits to their personal development. This is characteristic of History student behaviour across the HE sector. In large departments there is difficulty in providing and running sufficient placements for history students.

A small employability project is proposed to provide an alternative to a placement and will aim to achieve some of the gains of a placement by virtual or simulation means. It will involve a workplace such as a museum. Students will have virtual access to public information and further customised materials about its goals, activities, and internal workings. We will devise briefing papers to guide students through targeted case studies and exercises. By these means the students will familiarise themselves with the nature of the organisation, its different functions, such as organising and running an exhibition or devising funded projects, and the main roles and posts that staff occupy. Eventually students would apply for a 'real' post and go through part of a selection procedure such as presentations or mock interviews. They would need to understand the organisation, its work and its challenges, and to articulate their own suitability for employment, with confidence and credibility.

The project will provide a history subject dimension to a growing corpus of material related to simulations and placements for employability in other HEA subject centres. The materials and exercises developed will be transferable to other history and heritage courses and programmes across the sector. The museum material will be generic (ie a 'virtual museum' even though it is based on a particular one) and thus usable and adaptable by any History department in HE.

The project report and materials, as well as a case study, will be made available through the Subject Centre website as well as other avenues.

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