Supporting both learning and research in a UK post-1992 university library: a case study

Nationally, there has been debate on the role of research within higher education and increased interest in the teaching/research nexus. A team of Academic Liaison Librarians at Anglia Polytechnic University was awarded funding to investigate the extent to which learning resources overlap with research resources, whether researcher/teachers encourage their students to use the resources they use themselves and how far electronic resources have affected the relationship between learning and research materials. Semistructured interviews were carried out with 21 academics who are both teachers and researchers. They proved to be committed to using research in their teaching. Students were encouraged to engage with research through the recommendation of resources, seminar discussion, and researchers’ own work for reading and illustrating methodologies. Respondents claimed to be making significant use of the APU library website, online databases and journals. The majority of them were also recommending the same resources to their students. Convenience, speed and variety of information sources were quoted as some of the advantages of the new e-environment. A loss of a relationship with librarians and with the physical library was cited as an example of negative effects of the electronic resource environment

Implementing the Employability Agenda: A Critical Review of Curriculum Developments in Political Science and International Relations in English Universities

This article draws on research commissioned by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and conducted during 2013. It interrogates the ways in which the employability agenda has been fed through to the level of individual politics departments. The project was particularly concerned with establishing whether, and how, colleagues in politics and international relations (IR) had taken ownership of student employability at the level of the curriculum. In the article, the key findings of the research are summarised. There is also discussion of the (sometimes troubling) professional implications of infusing concern for graduate outcomes within a pedagogic framework that emphasises critical engagement with the underpinning political structures of the labour market

Integrating progress files into the academic process: A review of case studies

A literature review of published case studies reporting progress file implementation was conducted with the intent of discovering how this is being interpreted and implemented in higher education institutions. The three studies found were analysed using an ideal type categorization developed by Clegg and Bradley (2006), that is, professional, academic or employment. All three case studies are examples of academics learning through experience about the process of personal development planning and how this integrates with current educational provision. As this is not a static process, an activity theory perspective may be a more useful framework to research how this understanding develops in a particular context. Currently the progress file is a contested object, which has not yet fulfilled its potential to place the student and their individual learning needs at the centre of the educational process