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01-Overview.Rmd

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+# About this toolkit
+
+Recent decades have seen a proliferation of new pedagogical approaches in humanities teaching. This comes in the wake of a growing awareness that students learn in a variety of ways, and that a more multifocal context provides more robust learning outcomes. This opening in pedagogical technique has come at the same time as an increased desire across a range of HEIs to embed student learning in practical careers contexts. Especially in the humanities, where popular stereotypes of the bookish and impractical scholar abound, it is important to help students (and the wider public) to appreciate the way that the cultivation of critical reading of both texts and culture, eloquent writing, and analytical skills can enable success across a variety of career pathways - not simply in academia.
+
+While there is a significant literature detailing implementation of these new approaches in disciplines such as science, education and business, there are far fewer documented examples in the context of humanities teaching. The publication of this open toolkit is meant to address some of this gap, by providing a complete range of materials with some accompanying commentary that were developed in the context of a second year undergraduate course at the University of Birmingham, "Religion in the Public Sphere". We provide some specific details of our own delivery, including some challenges and successes. 
+
+In the course students partner in small groups with a real local employer. The employer has set a problem that they are facing in their work, and students work to analyse the context and design a project which can address the "problem". While the course detailed below is inflected towards the study of religion, it has been designed in such a way that it might be easily adapted to a range of other humanities disciplines. We hope that others who use this toolkit may share feedback and changes they've made which might benefit the wider community of pedagogues integrating careers training and consultancy into humanities teaching.
+
+If you are interested in reading more about Work Integrated Learning, you may want to consult some of the following:
+
+- A Practical Guide for Work Integrated Learning
+- Pedagogy for employability
+- Impact of WIL on statement on work readiness
+- Employability and entrepreneurship embedded in professional placements
+- Connecting enterprise and graduate employability Challenges to the higher education culture and curriculum
+- WIL Guide June 2014

02-Chapter1.Rmd

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+# Step 1: Finding employer partners
+
+Demand is growing to develop our student's confidence so they are prepared for life after graduation. By embedding practical off-campus experiences into the curriculum, we are giving students the opportunity to develop professional behaviours whilst applying the theory of their course learnt at University.  Employer and community partners should be encouraged to take responsibility in shaping our students learning experiences and become an active partner of our community as we should be an active partner within theirs.
+
+The section below has been designed to give you practical advice on how to approach organisations, including suggested text for emails and resources once the experience is underway. It is important to ensure that parameters and expectations are set so that the experiences are enriching and mutually beneficial for all parties involved.
+
+## Getting started
+
+Employer partners are integral to Work Integrated Learning. Often we are unsure how much we can ask from our employer partners. This is of course dependent on the activity, however the best experiences are when both University and external staff develop objectives for student projects collaboratively. This sets up an expectation that employers should be taking an active role in students learning and teaching. Depending on what experience employers have had in the past workign with external consultants, they may bring a wide range of expectations regarding student work and their own input towards the process. Consider ways that you can cultivate a cooperative relationship, and avoid  transactional or instrumental interactions. When possible each party should contribute at design, execution and course review stages.
+
+The 'Religion in the Public Sphere' module had 25 students enrolled, and we aimed for groups of 4-5 per team. As a result, we recruited 5 employers from a range of backgrounds. It is important to give students a breadth of options and in this case demonstrate that their degree is valued within diverse professional settings. 
+
+## Step one: Finding employer partners 
+
+- The course manager should start with their own networks and approach your own employer contacts. 
+- Many Colleges will also have an assigned Internship Officer or Careers Network staff. Although the Internship Officer may not be able to find professional experiences for your module, they often have employer contacts and can save you time in identifying the right people to approach. 
+- Check with your Development or Alumni Relations office. Along with financial support, alumni often want to offer their time. Alumni Relations may be able to provide you with a list of suitable alumni to contact.
+- If you have exhausted these networks and your own contacts, then you can try a speculative approach. Fair warning, this is a potentially time consuming method when developing employer contacts, but volunteer boards such as [Do-it.org](https://do-it.org/) can help you narrow down your search.
+
+## Step 2: Making contact 
+
+This section has been designed to give you practical tips on how to make contact with employers, along with templates of text that you might want to use when emailing organisations. 
+
+Top tips are: 
+
+- Call the organisation before sending an email. Explain that you work for The University of Birmingham and would like to speak to the person that handles graduate recruitment or work experience opportunities for students. If they are not available, ask to take their email address and ask the person taking the the call to let the main contact know that you have called.
+- Check out `sample_email_template` in the `resources` folder for some text you can use to structure your first correspondence by email. Make sure it's concise, an employer will be busy and will only skim read the email. You only need enough information to grab the employer's attention. 
+- You may need to chase the employer and often there is a lot of going back and forth. On average, we would advise on chasing the employer three times.
+- Before meeting the employer in person, we would recommend having a telephone meeting with them first to explain the project.
+- If the employer is keen and is likely to work with you, always go to their workplace to meet them. This meeting will help you solidify the relationship but also gives you the opportunity to see the environment where the student/s will be working and confirm that it will work for the course and your particular cohort of students.
+- Before students enter the employers workplace to undertake their professional experience, you must risk assess the organisation so that the students are properly safeguarded. More guidance can be found in the 'Resources to safeguard students' section below.
+
+## Step 3: 
+
+Once the student/s are working with the host employer, it is advised that you have regular conversations with both the 'host employer' and 'students' to make sure that things are running smoothly and that expectations are aligned on both sides. If the off-campus experience is long-term e.g a year in industry then you should also plan to visit the students onsite. On our course, we required students to conduct just three 'research days' at the employers host workplace so we deemed that onsite visits weren't required. However, as a safeguard, we implemented three measures:
+
+- Once the projects are underway, each week in class the first 5-10 minutes of class are devoted to an open, unstructured time to check in with each group to share about their experience and challenges they have faced. 
+- Employers were asked to provide two contacts - one who would be the equivalent of a real-world supervisor and who was responsible for the specification of the project, ideally located onsite at the specific location. The second contact was intended to act as an organisational mentor for students.
+- We invited graduates from previous years in the course to act as "senior consultants" and act as student mentors for student groups, fielding questions and sharing from their own experience on the previous year.
+
+Note: If the off-campus professional experience is long-term (i.e. more than 20 working days) the opportunity should be paid.
+
+To prepare the employer and safeguard our students below are examples of documents  which can be adapted to suit your needs. 
+
+1. Terms and conditions should be signed by the host employer before students undertake off-campus experience. You can find a sample (`TandCs.pdf`) in the `resources` folder which has been adapted from the University of Birmingham's Code of Practice.
+2. `roles_and_responsibilities.pdf` (also in the `resources` folder) can be given to both students and host employer so everyone is clear what to expect, and what is expected of them.
+3. At the beginning of the module the employer is asked to deliver a briefing session. This is aimed to introduce students to the organisation's values, ethos and gain an insight into how the project they will work on, fits into the longer-term strategic goals of the organisation. So all parties are prepared for the briefing session, Roshni developed a briefign document that was given to students prior them attending the session. This was also sent to the host organisation to confirm all details were correct and so they could have a list of the students names. You can view a sample in `student_brief.pdf`.
+
+
+## Additional resources to safeguard students
+
+### Risk assessment guide (specific to University of Birmingham)
+
+This document is based on good practice and U.K law and is a brief guide which has been designed to support with risk assessment processes to safeguard our students before they undertake their placement. 
+
+Within the UK the placement provider is responsible for the health and safety of the student whilst on placement as if the student were their employee. It is the University’s responsibility to prepare students by helping them understand the risks to make informed judgement whilst on placement.
+
+Please note that in some cases contractual or legal requirements may be needed to supplement programmes such as Medicine, Teaching, and Social Work etc.
+
+The templates shared on this guide can be adapted to suit the needs of your individual programmes: it is recommended that the Risk Profiling document be used to determine the level of risk (`risk-profiling_document.pdf`).
+
+Before the placement is risk assessed it is important that you consider if the placement will:
+
+- Meet the learning outcomes identified
+- Provide the student with an authentic learning experience that is suitable for the students level of study
+- Fit in with the University’s values and strategy and that it will not pose any reputational risks.
+
+All placements should be risk assessed before the student undertakes the opportunity using the Risk Profiling document Preview the documentand the level of risk should be recorded on a Risk Assessment Form (`risk-assessment-form.pdf`).
+
+For further information contact Andrew Else, Insurance Manger for UoB  
+
+Further resources include:
+- [`placements_review_process_and_FAQ.docx`](resources/placements_review_process_and_FAQ.docx)
+- [`e-ASET-Health-Safety-for-Student-Placements-2016.pdf`](resources/e-ASET-Health-Safety-for-Student-Placements-2016.pdf)
+- [UOB_code_of_Practice_for_Placement_Learning.pdf](resources/UOB_code_of_Practice_for_Placement_Learning.pdf)

03-Chapter2.Rmd

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+# Step 2: Course (re)design and Delivery
+
+## Consultancy projects - pedagogical design challenges
+
+There were two primary design challenges facing our course. First, we brought a desire to integrate more practical content (i.e. engagement with employers, fieldwork, skills training, etc.) without detracting from student learning on more abstract critical theory which is also a chief aim of the course. As you will see below, we have attempted to interweave practical with abstract and included several exercises which are meant to synthesise student learning with regards to critical theory in the study of religion with the very concrete context of their consultancy project and the employer they are matched with. 
+
+Second, because of the "real world" context, there is a higher level of risk that student learning may stall when faced with unexpected challenges etc., so proactive outreach to students is key. Though on this course, there was ongoing input from professional services staff and lectures from other academic staff, logistics were managed by just one person, so there was a need to ensure that course management was efficient and that student feedback was carefully solicited and reflection facilitated at key milestones. These two tasks of interweaving theory and practice; and streamlining course management surface in a variety of ways in the below toolkit.
+
+
+## What did we learn? Reviewing year 1
+
+As you will read in the next chapter, we undertook an extensive review of the course which engaged with students and organisational partners. The toolkit involves some resources which you can use to replicate the review process for your own course, but it is worth mentioning some of what we learned from our first year of the course which will illuminate some of the design elements below.
+
+- The interviews with industry informed us that structure is needed to guide both hosts and students through the experience. To help all parties have an understanding of their role (and each other's roles) we designed a 'roles and responsibilities' document (mentioned below). We also asked employers to indicate specifically how often they would prefer to be in contact with student teams (this varied widely). 
+- Students struggled to maintain progress with only the project completion as a milestone for their work. To keep students on track, we added a series of more granular milestones and students will be asked at the beginning of the project to complete a project plan and present it to the organisation host during their first meeting after the initial orientation. This project plan can be used the structure the rest of the meetings that the host has with the students and to ensure that expectations are aligned.
+- In speaking to students about their experience, we learned that they sometimes felt adrift in this very new context. We added a check-in during the lecture time. Students will be asked to present brief updates to the rest of the group, similar to updates given in a professional team meeting/ boardroom. This enables a low risk context for student teams to raise concerns, adjust expectations and troubleshoot problems as they arise.
+- We also discovered that students and organisations all had different conceptions of what "consultancy" work implied. Along with the written materials developed for employers, we invited an external speaker (who is themselves a professional consultant) to give a talk to students on 'what is a consultant?' - explaining how their role is different from the usual 'employee'.
+- Past students will be asked if they would like to peer support the new teams of students during their project. 
+- We have added further reflection sessions that encourage students to reflect on the skills they have gained during the module.
+
+
+
+## About our course
+
+This course, a core offering on our "Politics, Religion, and Philosophy" degree programme provides students with a set of critical tools for interpreting and critiquing the different ways that religion can be configured across different public contexts. The course covers 200 total hours of student work across two semesters. This includes:
+
+- Ten 2-hour lectures (many of these include problem-based learning exercises)
+- Five 2-hour research skills training sessions (we provide initial introductions to survey design, focus groups, ethnography, and GIS, with the expectation that each student will "specialise" in just one of these forms of research)
+- 20-25 hours of engagement with their exployer / context
+- 7 hours engaging in critical self-reflections
+- 5 hours of preparation for project presentations
+- 70 hours of individual study
+- 15 hours of fieldwork
+- 45 hours of work on the policy project
+
+
+## Course structure
+
+The course aims to integrate a range of different modes of teaching and learning:
+
+1. Lectures on critical theory & religious studies
+2. Training in empirical research methods and fieldwork
+3. Practical professional skills training sessions 
+4. Student presentations and workshops
+5. Critical self-reflection
+
+We expect that (1) will be altered to suit another course in some similar configuration of texts, theory, and context. 
+
+
+### Research Methods and Fieldwork
+
+Embedding training in research methods (2) is especially critical for this course design, given that many students in the humanities will not necessarily have gotten training in their first year. We are developing a combination of lab-books (for flipped-classroom style instruction), and open-source workshops which will be put up and will be available for use in a later version of this toolkit. 
+
+We have also designed (see further below) a series of worksheets to structure and facilitate some of the early stages of research design and reflection. These are all included as part of this toolkit which you can modify as necessary.
+
+
+### Skills training
+
+For this course, we have opted to work with very brief (15-30 minute presentations) to highlight the professional skills that are being drawn upon and learned along the course. In the present configuration, aside from research methods training there are five core skills being higlighted:
+
+- Self-presentation (i.e. writing a C.V.)
+- Critical self-reflection
+- The nature of consultancy work (as opposed to ordinary employment)
+- Board-room presentations (i.e. of work in progress)
+- Working with peer review
+
+These skills training sessions dovetail with self-reflective prompts (formative assessment) and are synthesised in the final (summative) policy project write-up.
+
+
+## Timeline
+
+[embedded image here]
+
+
+## Some practical advice:
+
+Students will find the course very challenging.

04-Chapter3.Rmd

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+# Step 3: Course Feedback

README.md

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+This repository contains the contents of a toolkit designed by Jeremy H. Kidwell and Roshni Barot at the University of Birmingham. The toolkit distills our experience deploying student consultancy projects in undergraduate teaching in 2017-2019 and is meant to provide resources for faculty and support staff seeking to run their own UG consultancy projects.
+
+The course here has been compiled with [bookdown](https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown), and so the live instance of the course is compiled from openly accessible resources located in this repository. If you're interested in doing something similar, there are a number of good options, including: [gitbook](https://docs.gitbook.com/), [mkdocs](https://www.mkdocs.org/), [readthedocs](https://readthedocs.org) which technically uses [Sphinx](http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/) or [daux](https://daux.io/).
+
+Directory structure includes:
+* `README.md` this README file displayed on Github
+* `docs` a folder containing the compiled book in html, .pdf and epub formats
+* `course.bib` a bibliography of items used for the course in [BibTeX format](http://www.bibtex.org/Format/)
+* `index.Rmd` Contains initialization settings, and preface content
+* `01-Overview.Rmd` About this toolkit
+* `02-Chapter1.Rmd` Step 1: Finding employer partners
+* `03-Chapter2.Rmd` Step 2: Course (re)design and Delivery
+* `04-Chapter3.Rmd` Step 3: Course Feedback
+* `05-Conclusion.Rmd` Conclusion
+
+Content here, unless otherwise indicated are copyright by Jeremy H. Kidwell and Roshni Barot. But please re-use them as they are covered by [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).

index.Rmd

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+# Introduction to the module
+
+This toolkit has been designed to enable faculty to embed student consultancy projects within an undergraduate humanities course. This may be transferrable to PG teaching or to other disciplines, but has been curated with some specific elements towards this learning stage and discipline. Here we provide some narration of our design process as well as some wisdom gained from running the course. We've also tried to present some generic versios of specific resources we designed which other faculty and support staff seeking to run their own UG consultancy projects can re-use.

resources/sample_email_template.md

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+Dear, XXX
+
+
+I am working on a module aimed at students studying XXX. 
+
+As part of the module the students will be split up into groups of roughly 5 or 6 to work on a consultancy project for an organisation.
+
+The module starts XXX until XXX. The consultancy project will take place during XXX. 
+
+I am in contact as I hoped that XXX would be able to host a team of students. Below are more details about what it entails to host students. 
+
+**The role of the organisation:**
+
+-Offer one group of students a project brief to work on. 
+-A representative to act as a point of contact/mentor for the students and guide them through the professional experience. 
+-Organisation to invite students into the work premises to set the brief and give the students the opportunity to ask any initial questions (2 hour) 
+-To allow students the opportunity to work in their teams from the office (perhaps within a meeting room) a minimum of 3 times during the consultancy project. Days/hours can be flexible. 
+
+**Benefits to the organisation:**
+
+-Students offer a fresh perspective, new ideas and add a new dynamic to the office environment. 
+-A great opportunity for XXX to promote themselves and opportunities to students. 
+-A way to spot talent. 
+-To contribute to our students development. 
+
+It would be great to hear your thoughts. 
+
+I hope it is okay you at some point so we can talk through any questions that you may have? 
+
+Best wishes, 
+XXX
+