Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst for WINCan and Executive-in-Residence in the British Columbia Association of Institutes and Universities and the Monash University Faculty of Arts .
Kyle Jackson is a faculty member in History at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and a Fellow of the International Institute for Asian Studies.
Jennifer Williams is a faculty member in Kwantlen’s English department with a current focus on Canadian and British fiction and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
In a previous post in this series, we introduced the idea of using innovations in our own workplace for learning in higher education as opportunities for students to engage with workplace innovation. In this post we’ll describe two of our pilot projects in which students engaged in reflection on their experiences in adapting their work practices – for learning – to align with new teaching and learning methods and their own personal approaches to learning. We want to use pilot projects like this to explore how we can develop students’ capability for Innovation Adaptation, a key process in scaling up the impacts of workplace innovations.
Instructional Design to Introduce Innovation Adaptation: The introduction of a new learning practice can become a ‘teachable moment’ for students to develop their skills, knowledge and mindsets in Innovation Adaptation. We illustrate this process with a pre-class handout and exercise preparing students for an upcoming discussion of innovation as a social process in the workplace in a first-year university Writing class offered by an English department. Key elements of the course focused on “reading, writing, and critical thinking skills” in a university environment. The innovation in learning practices which students encountered in this course was the use of ePortfolios to promote reflection and demonstrate cross-curricular skills
The activity included reflection on their recent engagement with ePortfolios as a tool for reflection and documentation on course learning activities and their relation to future workplace tasks. The students had already shown a range of expectations when the ePortfolio use was introduced as an ongoing course element.
Here’s the question we want to explore with you in the class session next week:
How can I use my experiences “at work as a student” (in the work of learning) to demonstrate skills and knowledge that will transfer to other workplaces for future employers, with a special emphasis on the new capabilities emerging to address innovation in the workplace?
(We’re also convinced that this capability to engage effectively with innovation will be equally applicable in your other roles beyond work, e.g., as community members and global citizens.)
Preparation:
Skim the attached overview on Building an Innovation-Enabled Workforce. (to be discussed further in the class session)
Watch this 7 minute video about the method we are planning to adapt to help you think about and demonstrate how your skills and knowledge will translate into the workplace. There’s more about the SEAL process described in the video in the attached 3-page handout.
Come prepared to discuss your experiences with innovations in your courses this term, such as the History Go! Assignment within HIST 2390 or the use of ePortfolios in ENGL 1100.
Notes on this Instructional Design:
This video used in this pre-class preparation is part of an hour-long, free online course developed by the University of Queensland: EMPLOY101x "Unlocking your employability". The handout for the SEAL process – Situation, Effect, Action and Learning – was also an adaptation of University of Queensland Employability resources. Our thanks to UQ’s Dino Willox and Anna Richards for supporting this part of our work.
In addition to trialing this approach in two sections of the Writing course, we repeated the exercise in a second-year course in History. In Hist 2390, an experimental course offering on History Go! An Interactive Historical Experience. The capstone course project engaged students in creating content for a cell phone app which pops up location-aware anecdotes about interesting historical aspects of local places. The pre-class instructions to students and the in-class exercises and guidance were otherwise the same for the course units in both disciplines.
What we learned: The students in both subject areas were intrigued by the idea of demonstrating and documenting a signature workplace capability which might help them to stand out in future interactions with employers. Almost all of the students had engaged with the online video case and in class were able to work through the SEAL analysis process steps adapted from the University of Queensland.
One obstacle for some students was their ability to recall their emotional response to the introduction of the innovation in learning practices, a key part of the Effects step in the SEAL analysis process. We had delayed the learning activity in which they reflected on the impact of the innovation to avoid competing for students’ attention while they coped with the innovation. In retrospect this made it more difficult for some students who had not recognized their reaction as a critical incident for reflection. Recognizing critical incidents is a key component of the process in learning from reflection on practice.
A final obstacle in fully engaging students in reflection on their Innovation experiences in these courses was the lack of an immediate, tangible mark of accomplishment. We offered to support students who wanted to incorporate their experiences with Innovation Adaptation in their ePortfolios. The Teaching Assistant leading this aspect of the project reported to us that our promise of future compensation in the form of Employability could not compete with more immediate student priorities. This contrasts with the student interest in digital badges we offered as recognition of student accomplishment in a later pilot project.
What we’ll do next: In the next iteration of our effort to promote reflection on Innovation Adaptation, we intend to implement changes which address these obstacles, such as the following:
The reflection could be a credit-bearing option in another course unit at the same university, a course on the transition from secondary school learning practices to university level learning (which is a recommended course unit for all incoming Faculty of Arts students). This is part of a two-course sequence with the second course targeting senior students facing a complementary transition from university into the workplace.
Another model we will be exploring for recognizing achievement on such Employability outcomes is the STLR model (Student Transformative Learning Record) at the University of Central Oklahoma. Students seeking to advance achievement on UCO’s graduate attributes are able to identify which course units in a particular term can provide them with such opportunities. In our case, that would include any course units with an innovative learning practice to allow students to engage and develop their Innovation Adaptation capabilities.
[A more comprehensive exploration of these issues, reporting on all our 2018 pilot projects at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Workplace Innovation as a Graduate Attribute, can be found in our upcoming book chapter Carey, T., Dastur, F., & Karaush, I. (2019). Workplace Innovations and Practice Futures. In Challenging Future Practice Possibilities (pp. 229-242). Brill Sense Publishers.]