Preface

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Billett, S
Orrell, J
Jackson, D
Valencia-Forrester, F
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2020
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Abstract

This edited book aims to offer a range of insights about the processes and outcomes of enrichening higher education students’ learning through post-work placement interventions. That is, using these interventions after students have completed their work placements to enrich those learning experiences and integrate them into the students’ program of study and their learning. Work placements and their integration into the experiences provided in and by higher education institutions are now becoming essential elements of higher education. This is because there are growing demands for these students to secure capacities during their studies that will assist them find employment and be productive upon graduation. Although once restricted to healthcare, law, and education, the use of work placements, work experiences, and practicums of different kinds is now becoming a common element of the higher education provision. However, just providing work placement experiences alone is insufficient. Instead, it is necessary to assist students to draw upon, utilize, and reconcile what they have learnt through their workplace experiences with what they are being taught and are learning through the university-based components of their higher educational programs. Hence, there is a need for educational interventions to engage students in these processes and realize these outcomes. The collected contributions in this edited monograph draws on the processes and outcomes of projects that were part of a large national teaching grant funded by the Australian federal department of education. That grant aimed to identify how best students’ workplace experiences can be integrated into their programs of study. The key focus for the work in this grant was how, once students had participated in or completed workplace experiences, those experiences could be utilized to assist students’ immediate studies, but also make them better placed to enjoy effective transition to work beyond graduation. This grant built upon two earlier teaching fellowships that focused on the integration of students’ activities in work settings and the outcomes that have arisen from them into their programs of studies. Those earlier fellowships firstly explored the importance of students being agentic learners to engage effectively in both workplaces and their university-based activities and, importantly, to actively reconcile the two sets of experiences. The second of the two fellowships was far larger and explored curricular and pedagogic practices that can promote the effectiveness of the two sets of experiences and how best they might be integrated within higher education programs across a range of disciplines and programs. In that second fellowship, the importance of engaging students actively after they had completed their work placements, practicums, clinical experiences and the like was identified as being perhaps the most important moment to engage students in considering their experiences, reconciling them with what they are seeking to learn through those programs and taking the opportunity to share, compare, and contrast with other students. In particular, accessing others’ experiences provided opportunities to learn from a far wider range of sources than individuals’ own workplace experiences.

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Enriching Higher Education Students' Learning through Post-work Placement Interventions

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28

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Education

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Billett, S; Orrell, J; Jackson, D; Valencia-Forrester, F, Preface, 2020, 28, pp. vii-x

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