We delivered an interactive workshop at Education Day: To Inclusivity and Beyond.
Our workshop was titled ‘Refreshing The Skills Agenda’ and aimed to explore the ideas of participants around necessary disciplinary and transferable skills for undergraduate students. We wanted to find out what range of skills were thought to be needed for successful graduation and where these should be placed and prioritised in the learning experience of the students.
Following the initial small group discussions, we collected feedback from the groups about the types of skills that were considered important. We considered the granularity of some of the skills, and whether they could be tackled or named as stand alone ‘skills’, or if they were tasks or functions that employed multiple skills or ‘sub-skills’. We also considered whether the skills were disciplinary or non-disciplinary and what this meant in terms of how they should be delivered in the curriculum. We also had feedback about skills that are difficult to ‘teach’, but which students feel are important – such as networking.
Finally, we presented a brief case study of our own work around skill development, including our introduction of ‘nested’ skill families such as ‘learning fitness’, ‘thinking’, ‘networking’, ‘information handling’ and ‘imagineering’. This project has been co-developed with the students in our Global Challenges courses.