Associate Professor in English Literature • Chair of the School of Humanities Community of Practice for Employability • Co-Director of the York Research Unit for the Study of Satire  

Qualifications

BA (Hons) in English Literature, MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies, PhD, University of Sheffield

What is an Employability Module?  

For the past few years, every degree programme at YSJ has been required to include one module dedicated to Work-Related Learning. These modules are, in essence, intended to help students enhance their employability. Within Higher Education, employability is defined as: “a set of achievements – skills, understandings and personal attributes – that makes graduates more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations, which benefits themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy“. 

In 2020-22, Adam was the Chair of the Community of Practice for Employability in the YSJ School of Humanities, a forum which ran during the pandemic years and brought together colleagues from a wide range of different programmes to think about the way ‘employability’ is taught in the School. Many of the members of this forum were the directors of the compulsory Work-Related Learning module of their respective programmes. The Community of Practice surveyed the employability provision in operation at their time, shared their own experiences, and drafted a proposal for the school’s future employability strategy. They produced a set of actions which, they believed, might further enhance the way Work-Related Modules run. 

When in 2023-24 Adam inherited the Work-Related Learning module for his own programme, English Literature, he welcomed the opportunity to test some of the ideas that came out of the Community of Practice. In this interview, Adam discusses some of the positive outcomes that have emerged from this experiment, and the positive ways in which these changes have been received by this year’s students.  

The Challenges Associated with The Traditional Model for Employability Modules 

Having chaired a vast range of conversations in his role as chair of the Community of Practice for Employability, Adam noticed a series of common themes emerge relating the challenges of delivering a compulsory Work-Related Learning module:  

• Separate from the course: Module directors reported that some students felt it was a shame to have a compulsory module on their degree dedicated to employability, rather than the discipline they had enrolled to study. 

• Disciplinary Study vs Employability creates a binary understanding. By having a module exclusively for employability, it can potentially suggest that other modules do not factor into one’s employability, creating the false impression that most of the degree doesn’t have “real world value”.   

• Leads away from, rather than towards, disciplinary thinking when applying for jobs: The Community of Practice identified that, because students view Work-Related Learning modules as being a separate part of their degree, they don’t always make connections between their day-to-day study and the world of work. Adam says he wants to “make [students] think a little more self-consciously about what they’re doing as part of their degree, on a day-to-day basis, and be able to draw examples of their skills from that experience”. He explains that “If you ask ‘Can you give me an example of where you might solve a problem?’, students tend to reach for experience they have gained working part time alongside their studies, often in hospitality or catering, and that is great, but I also want them to consider their experience they’ve gained participating in seminars or undertaking assessments as evidence of employable skills”. 

A New Approach: Foregrounding Disciplinarity when Teaching Employability  

Because of these factors, Adam wanted to attempt to “make [the employability module] into a literature module without losing anything”. He wanted to foreground the applicability of the skills that students learn throughout literature degree within his employability module, whilst also encouraging then to think more explicitly about what literary studies actually is and the various ways it might be beneficial to them and to society as a whole. To do so, Adam combines his usual modules with the employability module, to create less of a distinction between the two and change the perception as detailed above. “The idea is that by the end of the module, the students will feel like they’ve just done an employability module that was really very much still a Literature module, but at the same time they will also have realised that all of their Literature modules are also employability modules”. 

An Experimental Approach to ‘Literature at Work’  

According to Adam, the module is split into two sections: “Theory” and “Application”. Theory is thinking about what literature is as a discipline: what it actually means to study literature and why we do this. In this section, the module looks at things like the Quality Assurance Agency’s benchmark statements for English Literature to see what it is that universities think the discipline is, whilst also looking at a wide range of criticism vexed by this very same question, by figures such as Lionel Trilling and Kate Briggs. This is then followed by the application half of the module, during which students are encouraged to think more explicitly about the applicability of what they’re learning to specific vocational pathways. The module operates as follows: 

• Foregrounding Disciplinarity: To help students think about the value of literature and the relationship between work and identity, there are weeks dotted throughout the module centred around specific literature texts, such as Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and Jane Gardham’s Crusoe’s Daughter. When choosing the texts, Adam was mindful to choose books that students would be excited about reading in the hopes of making the whole proposition of thinking about the future an enticing one. For example, “Rebecca Kuang’s Yellowface was the biggest novel of last summer, but it is all about the internal workings of the publishing industry”; therefore, the students are getting to analyse literature whilst learning about relevant jobs.  

• Embedding Graduate Attributes: Part of the first assessment on the module sees students reflecting on two of the YSJ Graduate Attributes and talking about how they rehearse these attributes as part of their day-to-day study. To prepare for this, the Attributes are discussed explicitly as part of each session for the first half of the module and form the basis of the mock interviews described below. In each component of the second assignment, students are again encouraged to refer to the Attributes. By the end of the module, they are fluent in discussing their experiences using the language of the Graduate Attributes. 

• Guest speakers: In second half of the module, “Application”, there are three vocational sessions about Marketing, Publishing and the Portfolio Career, and Teaching. As part of their second assessment, students need to research a profession mentioned during one of these talks and think about how their Graduate Attributes might relate to that field of work. Adam was able to draw on speakers already working at YSJ when doing this, given that so many major roles in the institution are held by Literature graduates. These sessions ensure students have a sense of what the Graduate Attributes are, as well as giving them an opportunity to network. 

• Mock interviews: Halfway through the module, each student is required to do a mock interview. This was a feature developed in the previous iteration of the module. The interview itself is not assessed, but rather a forward-feeding reflection written afterwards, about how students might apply the lessons from their interview in the future. Many of the interviews are conducted by volunteer staff on other programmes, giving students an opportunity to perform in front of a colleague they haven’t met previously, thus allowing students to practise an authentic interview whilst also gaining feedback in preparation for job interviews. The main change that Adam made this year was to the questions asked, which now focus on getting students to articulate the value and applicability of studying Literature. Feedback was positive from both the interviewers and interviewees involved. 

• Arranging work experience: Students are tasked with arranging approximately seven days’ worth of self-directed Work-Related Experiential Learning, which can take the form of shadowing, a placement, upskilling, volunteering, or a combination of different activities. Students are also sign-posted to in-house projects and initiatives happening within the university. Adam has devised a competitive application process for students wishing to apply for in-house projects. One such project is “York St John Critical Editions”, described below.  

The Benefits of this Approach

• Empowering students to draw on a wider range of employability experiences: On top of any existing experience they might have gained through part-time work, the module helps students to recognise and describe the vocational skills they have developed on their degree every day, and really advocate for the benefits of humanities study when applying for jobs. 

• Instils a values-based approach to life after study: Students are encouraged to think not only about possible career paths but, more importantly, about their own values and how these have developed during their studies. This equips students with something to look for when navigating the world of work. They have hopefully learnt to think about what it is that they value, what they enjoy, and what they are particularly good at and enthusiastic about. This gives them a starting point. “You’re interviewing your employer as much as they are interviewing you”, Adam observes, “so it’s important that students know what to look for”. The module allows students to think about the future and learn about their own values, furthering their career paths and helping them decide what they want to achieve post-university.  

• Identifying “authentic:”: The module team make a special effort to highlight whenever students engage in an activity for which there is an analogue in the world of work. This is most obvious when taking part in the interviews or applying for a place on an in-house placement project, but there are more subtle instances. For example, writing a response to the brief that draws on their experiential learning in a way that showcases their application of Graduate Attributes is basically the same as writing a covering letter which speaks to a job specification. This can help students feel more confident and comfortable when leaving university and job seeking, as they would have gone through their trial and error during the module in preparation for their life after university.  

• Reflection skills: Adam found it best to assess the students on their reflective abilities, as this also aids students in their own self-development. At the end of the day, the module is as much about “life after study” as it is employability, and if students can harness the reflective skills they rehearse whenever studying a literary text to navigate their future, that’s a massive win for everyone. 

Adam’s Practical Example:  York St John Critical Editions  

The Parrot was a periodical in the 1740s, edited by Eliza Haywood. By today’s standards, the periodical is remarkably progressive, proving both antiracist and postfeminist. Adam wanted to teach the text on his second-year module ‘Dawn of Print’, but found this would not be possible as there was no modern edition of the text that met the university’s Accessibility requirements. To solve this problem, Adam decided to develop an in-house project which would see students taking the employability modules on the English Literature degree and the Publishing MA creating and curating a modern edition. This internal project, which the students all had to apply for competitively, would then contribute towards the work experience segment of the module. Adam appointed four Literature students and one from Publishing. The Literature students were tasked with transcribing and editing the original texts to be passed onto the publishing student, who would do the typesetting and transform it into an eBook, to then finally be published for public access in August 2024. The project also involvec marketing, including hosting a launch event for the book as part of the York Georgian Festival Pet Mansion House. The project has been reported on in The Observer. On top of this, the students were also able to network and gain feedback from one of the guest speakers about e-book production, making it an extremely beneficial and meaningful experience. 

Recommendations 

There are many replicabilities with this format, and Adam encourages colleagues from across the university to incorporate the employability aspect in all modules. This doesn’t necessarily involve doing anything extra, except to find moments for students to reflect metacognitively on what they are doing as part of the day-to-day of their studies, and about how this might be more widely applicable. For assessments, it is about the relationship between work and identity, reflection, and giving a purpose to the work through practicality (see also Lawrence Jones-Esan’s case study). It is good practice to allow students the space to assess the Graduate Attributes and consider employability during their course, as it makes them prepared for, and hopefully more confident in, life after study. Although Adam acknowledges that a redesign can involve a massive workload, he recommends making such changes as it is so beneficial for the students.  

Conclusion 

Adam hopes that as time goes on, universities will not need an employability module as these skills will be integrated into everything the students do. As seen in other case studies (see Lawrence Jones-Esan and Lorna Hamilton), considering practicality and the ability to apply knowledge gained to particular tasks can lecturers to help students develop the confidence and skills needed for life after study. 

– By Amber Thomas and Megan Orgill, York St John University.