Co-framing employability: mapping transferable skills with media students (mobilising articulations through practice).

Abstract

The ‘Co-framing employability project’ is about four interrelated research strands; it constitutes a curriculum gap, presents an open, accessible pedagogic model for other practitioners to adapt, and whilst it provides a de-centred reappraisal of transferable skills, it also brings to light observations on their ‘rhizomatic’ functionality. The fieldwork took place in a further education college in the North- West region of the United Kingdom. The participants involved were also my students. Given that Participatory Action Research steps taken combined both critical and constructivist approaches, although our research is classified as ethnography in action, individual outcomes are analysed and interpreted through a post-structural lens. Drawing particularly on Deleuze and Guattari’s (2013) work, this is validated through their concepts such as the rhizome, mapping, thought as nomadic including their emphasis on the processual. As transferable skills are something of a moving target, transitory, and always personal, the signification of our research resides within articulations themselves, as attributed through the student experience; contingent on their interpretation and contextualisation at the point of articulation. I considered the absence of curriculum emphasis regarding student capacity to articulate their skills a fundamental flaw and consequently an important pedagogic issue to address. Using a shared language (Youth Employment UK, 2017) methods focused specifically on supporting our key argument that student articulation of their transferable skills represents the nexus upon which employability and curriculum converge. The development of our co-constructed IMADE (Identify, Map, Articulate, Do, Evaluate) model to bridge understanding emerged as a result of consciously privileging participant agency as central as we sought an alternative, more useful employability discourse that students understood and were able to articulate. Unique ‘student graduated articulations’ reveal progression came into effect and celebrate student confidence to diversify (by redefining transferable skills both across the five IMADE steps and outside of our co-devised Personalised Transferable Skills Tracker), legitimising our claims to new knowledge creation. IMADE is both inclusive and flexible, intended to accommodate learner differentiation and diverse subject disciplines. In response to both institutional and student concern(s), we believe that continuing to cultivate more considerate pedagogic strategies in which student articulations can flourish, can only add value towards the broader learner experience.