Reflections on the employability and skills agenda in the Social Sciences

Change in education is necessary and to be expected. However, sometimes the nature of change is so radical as to constitute a rupture. The consequences of such a moment may be severe, disruptive and damaging. In such times, foundations can be lost. In this article, we argue that the employability agenda instituted in Higher Education (HE) constituted such a moment. However, it was facilitated by an excessively narrow interpretation and application of active learning pedagogy. The employability agenda premised a confining set of skills for employment, privileging active skills and defining them in such a way as to exclude other related, foundational skills. Further, the employability agenda has been particularly detrimental in being both caused by and a reflection of the rise of the student as consumer (Bunce et al. Reference Bunce, Baird and Jones2017). As a result of the borrowing of active skills from the natural sciences, especially medicine, there has been a discursive linking of employability or skills on the one hand and innovation via active learning on the other hand in the Social Sciences, too.

Subsequently, a fallacious understanding of active learning in the Social Sciences has developed. Two things can be said about this. First, it constitutes a blind disregard for the notion of universities as sites to develop critically questioning, reflective thinkers. Second, it suggests such thought is not itself a skill of utility in a wide range of careers and professions (and for citizens). Paradoxically, this overly exclusive interpretation of “active” in active learning and the continued construction of structures to propel excellence in learning has led to exactly the opposite in those geographies where active learning has been more deeply embedded. In the creation of administrative and bureaucratic structures at European (at least) universities, agency was relocated from the classroom to the boardroom. Deans’ offices, executive boards, senates etc. of universities increasingly provide strict requirements about the minimum/maximum number of assessment items, word count, age of texts to be relied on, educational tools to be used (Microsoft PowerPoint, lecture capture, reading list management systems) and number of sources to be used. All this leaves course convenors to implement but not decide what might best facilitate students´ learning. This article asks critical questions about what this loss of student and staff agency means for universities as places for building and practising academic thinking.

Before that, some acknowledgements. We, the authors, were ourselves persuaded by the turn to innovative teaching methods, focussed on active learning. Until more recently, David’s teaching was characterised by a rejection of wholesale traditional transmission-orientated teaching, tipping the balance in favour of enquiry-based learning (EBL), including problem-based learning (PBL), small scale investigations and research. Her application was and is directed at modules or parts of modules, as opposed to the more structured and systematic PBL approach that is the hallmark of Maastricht University, where Maurer taught from 2008 to 2017. There, students learned in the more structured form, using the “seven jump” approach (Maurer Reference Maurer, Ishiyama, Miller and Simon2015). Based on our long experience in the classroom and reflections upon it, as well as our engagement with the wider academic community, this article acts as a cautionary tale for the academy in those geographies where the employability turn is being considered or beginning to be implemented. It offers, additionally, a launch platform for a critical discussion in the profession to reflect upon what has been lost by this turn. What we argue for is a reconsideration and rebalancing of the traditional with the innovative.

The time is particularly apt for such critical reflection given the appetite the COVID-19 pandemic has created to reconsider what we teach, how and why. Education has been elevated to the top of political and societal debates as “teachers” have been recognised as “frontline workers”, but also, we argue, in terms of their role as experts responding to societal and political developments (Harrison and Luckett Reference Harrison and Luckett2019; Irani 2021). Equally, the pandemic has also cemented the understanding of learning as a social experience with the role of academics in this micro-society as one that has to be carefully navigated. What we deliver in this article, therefore, are ideas about when academics in the classroom should centre themselves and when they should centre the student. Crucially, however, we argue that both must happen.

Drawing on the conceptual unpacking of “skills” and “agency”, we show that the academic has gradually, in many contexts, suffered a severe loss of agency. But while many academics rail against the student as consumer, what is perhaps less understood is that the student has also lost agency. Both have lost their sense of place in HE (academics benefiting from their longer service in universities may be most aware of this). What is needed is a purposeful re-integration of the useful aspects of the old with the added value of innovation. What is also needed, though, is a return of the academic to the academy as expert and educator and the student as student, with ownership over their learning but not their teaching.

We first introduce the wider HE discussion on employability and skills. Next, we assess the reasons why active learning pedagogy has been transposed to the Social Sciences. We outline our critique of what has been lost in the rush to fix disciplines that were not broken. In a setting of “professionalised” teacher training, all-university educational development and increased quality assurance frameworks, academics in the Social Sciences have not mounted sufficient defences, have not taken the place they could have taken in the educational avantgarde and, as a consequence, have suffered from an attendant loss of confidence. The next part emphasises the skills lost in the rush to institute an employability agenda that has, largely, been about innovation in teaching, the outcome of an impression that teaching in HE hitherto was not fit for purpose. We focus on reading, listening and note-taking and treat all of these as foundational, active contributions to learning. We show that the preoccupation is with a flawed understanding of what constitutes “active” in the learning process. We also contend that the active aspects show too little consideration for outcomes in respect of learning. We deliver our own experience-based thoughts about the process through which learning takes place and argue this process itself reflects the development and employment of transferable skills. Again, we argue for a re-integration of basics. In the final part, we advocate an understanding of foundational skills. Bureaucratic processes and quality assurance have their place but the academic must be an active part of those processes, not the passive recipient of them. In short, we call for academics to reclaim their central place in the academy.

Skills in the university

What should students take away from a university education and especially from a Social Science degree? This is a long-standing debate in academia and beyond, not only since the demands put forward by proponents of the Bologna process. “Employability”, often also labelled as “real-world” or “practical” skills, is a frequent buzzword in university administration. This focus on the direct translation of a university education into employment applicability also features highly in the European policy setting, such as in the 2005 overarching framework for qualifications termed “Dublin descriptors” adopted by the European Higher Education Area (2005; see also Maurer and Mawdsley Reference Maurer and Mawdsley2014). But should academics act as mere trainers for employers? And in developing skills, do academics have nothing to say about what constitutes a vital skill?

In consulting studies about the employer perspective, we see more nuance than the employability debate in universities would lead us to expect. In a comprehensive study on employers´ perspectives on employability and skills in HE, Humburg et al. (2013) found that for graduates to be invited to a job interview, familiarity with the subject field, good grades and experiences that signal openness and independence (like studying abroad) are universally considered the most salient indicators by employers across fields. In relation to skills, they show “the most important skills are professional expertise and interpersonal skills” (2013: 94), that expert knowledge can be trained on the job, but this requires employees who have the capacity to acquire new knowledge and learn (2013: 75). Other parts of the debate reflect the situation in which one is applying the definition. In an article about employability in the UK, for instance, Morley (Reference Morley2001: 131) contextualised the “commodification” of the academy through reference to the closer relationship of academia to government policy and corporate interests. Morley additionally directed us to another issue in asking: “Do universities exist simply to meet the needs of modern capitalism and are students being constructed solely as future workers, rather than fully rounded citizens?” (Morley Reference Morley2001: 132).

Before addressing this important point about citizenship, there are questions to be asked about which future job market we should be preparing students for and when, given signs that people will have more than a single career trajectory in the near future (Slade 2017). It is also noteworthy that skills are only very latterly being revisited in a background of technological changes that see shorter attention spans, the challenges engendered by an era of social media, fake news, disinformation campaigns and consequences for critical thought and vulnerability to malign intentions (Harrison and Luckett Reference Harrison and Luckett2019). Thus, generally, the debate on employability has been interpreted narrowly, with assumptions made about what constitutes the “basics”. In addition, the linking of the skills agenda to employability (as a consequence of the liberal commodification occurring in many countries) rather than citizenship has drowned out significant conversations about the role of the university in creating active, reasoning citizens.

That said, this conversation is being held in certain places.Footnote ¹ The American Association of State Colleges and Universities has its American Democracy ProjectFootnote ² focussed on the nexus of HE and an informed citizenry. In the European context, publications listed on the Council of Europe’s websiteFootnote ³ and articles such as those of van Mol (Reference van Mol2018) or Biesta (Reference Biesta2009) reveal similar concerns. Neither author can remember working in a university where this aspect of HE achieved anything like the amount of attention that the employability agenda does. Thus, while the public purpose of HE in educating citizens for democracy does feature in many arenas, these nuanced arguments do not spill over to dominate debates within universities themselves.

There is plenty of scope, however, to extend existing conversations, and the anti-intellectualist tendencies that have dominated in the “fake news”, populist rejection of expertise and pandemic contexts constitute an imperative for this to happen. In the UK, the University of Glasgow and Edge Foundation produced a comprehensive study that examined employers’ perceptions of new graduates that found “universities need to equip graduates with ‘deep’ intellectual capabilities and a battery of applied practical skills which make them more ´work-ready´” (Lowden et al. 2011). Intellectual capabilities, in this context, should not only mean that students are able to apply academic knowledge, but also that they understand the distinct nature and added value of academic thinking. This is consistent with the utilitarianism versus intellectualism dichotomy identified by Morley (Reference Morley2001: 132) but fits with our own pedagogical ethos, i.e. that HE does not need to be about one or the other, and that good instructional design can ensure that students’ encounters with learning are intellectually demanding and satisfying but simultaneously also develop skills relevant to a range of careers. In so doing, we also reject any idea that the majority of employers look at graduates for either purely utilitarian or purely intellectual purposes. After all, if skills are all that are required, why look for graduates versus apprentices?

The Social Sciences are historically well-equipped to balance that utilitarian-intellectual agenda but have, perhaps, lost sight of what they have to offer in debates about “necessary” methods and skills. What is needed, is a more careful reflection on what the Social Sciences have long done but also what needs to be added anew, for example, web literacy skills that are based on identifying reliable sources but also require more technical understanding (see Caulfield 2018). Universities need to assert what they undoubtedly are best-suited to provide, that is teaching students to think academically: to enquire systematically and critically, to make discerning decisions regarding what constitutes well selected evidence, and to be able to problematise and formulate well-defined questions. This stands in stark contrast to the way university administrations, especially in the UK, seem to think. The most recent example is the University of Sunderland which, in early 2020, justified the closure of its politics degree on the basis of its newly developed “career-focused and professions-facing approach” (University of Sunderland 2020). More widely, as so powerfully argued by Bulaitis (2021), the UK has seen government continue to laud STEM subjects, to the detriment of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, on the basis that HE needs to be directed towards those subjects the Government has decided address “labour market needs”. Hence, at this point, it is also worth defending the idea that intellectualism itself does not preclude skills, rather academic thinking and academic working in the Social Sciences constitute skill sets for students (and employers). It is, therefore, only sometimes possible to separate the utilitarian from the intellectual agenda.

The adoption of active learning for skills development and our critique

Employability and skills have been used as an argument by universities and staff alike to tap into active learning pedagogy: “active” students learn better, they enjoy learning more because they feel in charge and they learn skills along the way. The teaching and learning scholarship is almost universally positive about the benefits to students of adopting active learning methods (Deignan Reference Deignan2009). Barriers to a move from traditional methods to EBL or PBL are well-explored, as are some of the pitfalls in actually making the move (Deignan Reference Deignan2009). Despite the nuances identified in the literature, the way active learning pedagogy is adopted across many European and UK universities is suggestive of an acceptance that traditional teaching methods are no longer fit for purpose. In such attempts to innovate, the main emphasis is put on active learning as positive for students because they develop skills that are relevant for their future employment. But do traditional teaching methods really have so little to offer or are we guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Before that, what is active learning and what are its relative benefits? Active learning puts students into an active researcher role, emphasising the relevance of enquiry over factual knowledge. Learning is “a process of knowledge construction” (Glaser Reference Glaser1991: 131) rather than knowledge transfer. Methods include use of simulations, role plays, flipped classrooms and reflective learning in teaching and assessments, on the basis that students learn and internalise more if they are active participants in learning rather than passive recipients of knowledge transfer. Thus, active learning “refer[s] to an assortment of techniques where students do more than simply listen to a lecture” (Ishiyama Reference Ishiyama2013). In active learning environments, students work in small groups, supported by the academic as facilitator. They pose questions, clarify and revise their notes (see Fig. 1). Positive outcomes identified are: the emergence of more independent learners who are simultaneously better team-players and likely to be lifelong learners; the acquisition of problem-solving skills and other transferable skills; more critical thinkers (Deignan Reference Deignan2009).

Fig. 1

Skills featured in active learning approaches

Those are the benefits. What, however, are the lacunae or problems that we identified in our work as instructors in active learning environments? The first comes in relation to skills and our focus is on three skills: reading, listening and note-taking.Footnote ⁴ Reading is, at least implicitly, covered in the active learning literature, although not sufficiently emphasised as a discrete, foundational skill. The others do not feature as key to learning. Thus, we contend that these three skills are assumed: all students know how to read, listen and take notes to the standard needed in tertiary education, in their specific discipline and particularly in an active learning environment. The active learning literature speaks of skills that we train in active learning but does not put sufficient emphasis on the underpinning skills needed to maximise the potential offered by active learning approaches. We offer a corrective by advocating early development of these three skills as fundaments of active learning methods.

Second, active learning methods are often portrayed in opposition to traditional methods of teaching, a corrective for the problems associated with “traditional” methods, which, at times have been equated to an “old-fashioned” and also “authoritarian” approach (Deignan Reference Deignan2009: 20). In earlier teaching days, both authors had sympathy for such arguments. To some extent, however, our experiences have caused us to inject more nuance into our thinking and practice. We reject the binary of the traditional versus the innovative, arguing that traditional methods honed key skills in a way that has been undervalued in active learning but which would greatly enhance its outcomes. In a later section, we further outline how the typical characterisation of the traditional as passive, and the innovative as active, is to deny the activity of the student when reading, listening and note-taking.

The third negative is that the replacement of traditional methods with an active learning environment has led to the problematic consequence that (1) agency is (fallaciously) perceived to shift from the educator to the student; and that, relatedly, (2) there is a false perception of student agency. Putting students in the driver's seat of enquiry without the right (skills) background equates to giving them a licence to be in charge of a vehicle (their own research process) without first offering adequate driving lessons.

Finally, in our critique of our own teaching and how we ourselves used the literature, we latterly realised that much of the active learning thinking emerged from scholarship largely focussed on medical, technical or natural science education. As a result of an unreflective adoption of these ideas and especially of the need to think about “employment skills”, academics in the Social Sciences were not properly appreciative of the fact that such skills had been integral to Social Sciences education for decades already (albeit those traditional skills were taught more by implication). Given our expertise lies in Politics and International Relations, this was doubly perplexing: why focus on employment-related skills in a discipline that already positively required (even if not always perfectly) students to acquire those self-same skills (e.g. research skills, communicating complex ideas orally and in writing, applying theory to current events)?

Our experience led us to conclude that losses associated with employing active learning approaches resulted from a failure to unpack that literature and engage in advocacy from the very start. It is important to emphasise, however, that we neither reject active learning nor advocate a return to purely traditional methods. Rather, we argue for a re-evaluation in how we adopt active learning pedagogy and for a hybrid approach that borrows from both the traditional and the innovative. A conversation, in a non-dichotomous way, about skills is warranted—and long overdue.

Necessary but undervalued? Learning actively through reading, listening and note-taking

Our critique of the adoption of the active learning literature is threefold: first, the foundational skills of reading, listening and note-taking (see Fig. 2) neither take a prominent role in teacher training nor feature prominently enough in the hands-on active learning resources. Both focus on the development of other skills when learning in an active manner rather than on those skills that are a prerequisite for active learning to work. Second, active learning methods are often portrayed in opposition to traditional methods of teaching. Third, we identify a loss of agency for both students and academics when the active learning pedagogy is applied superficially, and the employability discourse followed blindly.

Fig. 2

Skills featured in traditional teaching methods

Before exploring the foundational skills, a word on context. The problems identified above are exacerbated by other HE developments, especially technological. Lecture capture, posting of lecture slides, and linked library lists among others all conspire against active learning. This is not to say technology, when carefully applied, is not useful for building and developing academic thinking and skills. But if introduced in a blanket fashion, without the right pedagogical justification, these technological tools not only promote passive learning, they close down opportunities for skills development and deprive students of key, serendipitous means of learning. For instance, what did previous generations learn from spending time in stacks or databases that our students no longer learn because of the increasing tendency to use linked library lists or give overly concise (or extensive) reading lists? Whether willing or not, academics and students are the subjects of structural change that is driven by agendas other than the pedagogical one.

Concluding remarks: the need to bring back agency

We have not overlooked our own agency as academic instructors in ignoring the importance of the foundational skills of reading, listening and note-taking while promoting active learning pedagogy. We also had been somewhat seduced by the superficially portrayed employability agenda as well as the professionalisation demand from university bureaucracies. We were encouraged to focus on presenting instead of writing/reading/note-taking skills; to satisfy students by providing, effectively, our notes instead of making time to show them how to develop their own. Emphasis was on the perfect presentation, but no space was given to experience and to reflect on the need for failure or detours in academic thinking and researching. We have outlined, above, some of the structural drivers of our attachment to innovative teaching methods, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that those structural pressures were not applied to an already open door.

Our early readings of the literature on active learning saw us thinking in terms of binaries: that we need to move from the traditional and passive to the innovative and active. A crude visualisation of the classroom serves as an illustration. In traditional teaching, the lecturer stands at the front of the classroom, the students in rows facing them. In flipped classrooms, the space is literally reconceived; thus, students are at the front of the class, the lecturer to the side or the back; in other forms of active learning, the students sit at the centre of the room, the lecturer alongside them. Thus, the students take ownership of the classroom, the lecturer relegated to the role of facilitator. Today, we would both argue there is a clear place in which the expert stands before the students some, but certainly not all, of the time. Thus, we are calling for a marrying of skills, as represented in Fig. 3, on the basis that active learning cannot take place in the absence of reading, listening and note-taking, all of which were more obviously accounted for in traditional learning.

Fig. 3

Marrying skills

Our experience in more innovative spaces was that those foundational skills were not only wrongly taken for granted but that their absence was exacerbated by many of the tools employed in the name of “teaching professionalisation” or “student satisfaction”. Carpenter and Witherby (Reference Carpenter and Witherby2020), examining students’ “illusions of learning”, show convincingly that there is “an important disconnect between students’ impressions of effective teaching and the actual evidence of it. Students routinely associate ‘effective’ teaching with experiences that feel easy, smooth, fluent, or enjoyable”. But should learning be these things (all the time)? Who decides? And on what grounds?

Although we started thinking and writing about this prior to the pandemic, it is worth reflecting on how what we say here is impacted by the dramatically increased use of online teaching, where academics were forced to reflect on pedagogy in a way they never had to before (see the Political Studies Association’s excellent webinar seriesFootnote ⁵). The question of academic skills, employability and active learning remained pertinent in online teaching. While the consensus seems to hold that moving traditional learning formats online alone is not sufficient, the understandable fire-fighting nature of the pandemic-necessitated changes meant there has so far been limited engagement with how academic and professional skills could be (better) integrated and consciously developed in online learning environments. A good deal of the discussions arising from the forced adoption of online teaching has been focussed on how to incorporate active learning into this space (see Political Studies Association’s webinars⁵ and also Mihai 2021). But online, as well as offline, there has been little (if any) discussion of how we encourage and ensure reading and note-taking are performed. There has been more about listening, as a product of understanding attention spans are more limited online than off—an understanding which we hope will be turned into reflection on what we might have missed when thinking about the offline environment too. As many universities look to continuing to deliver classes online throughout 2021, while others toy with the idea of instituting more blended learning in the future, our concern remains the same.

Interestingly, despite the varying institutional and national contexts in which we have taught, in our conversations over the past decade, we have been struck by the commonalities in our experiences; and, more recently, by how we have come to see the virtues of structure. However, our reflections have led us to conclude that academics must do more to ensure that the function of educational bureaucracy is to guide, not dictate; to steer, not direct; and that the voice of the academic is not lost. Bureaucracy is the structure within which academics teach and students learn but it must be shaped in such a way as to afford sufficient agency both to academics and students and play a supportive rather than restraining role. Those in the Social Sciences who are under pressure to deliver on employability must explain the negative consequences of a universalising structure on our disciplines and on our students—and give evidence on how we already do what we should and do it well. Equally, we must consider what can be improved. In organising our classrooms, we need to reconsider the place and value of the lecture, think about how to ensure foundational skills are developed with the student and make the arguments for teaching in the manner we think best suited for the purposes we define. In short, we need to reclaim the academy.