Description
Teaching politics and international relations in Higher Education has shifted in recent years towards a focus on soft skills with employability as a core output alongside traditional subject material. The need to improve graduate outcomes in response to historical tuition fees increase has driven institutional and sector-wide responses that focus on add-ins, or additional support and opportunities for students to gain experience and soft skills, as well as reflective learning on translating these skills into statements of employability.
Yet, embedding a hands-on approach to teaching skills has proven difficult to achieve with reliable results. Instead, degree programmes are often based on assumptions of students' pre-existing skill sets, or an expectation that students will learn academic and professional skills as a byproduct of their degree.
This paper argues that these assumptions are problematic as they avoid focusing on the need to bridge the skills-gap present in students from Widening Participation (WP) backgrounds. In turn, it establishes that subject specific teaching has the potential to integrate this needed focus of skills training through the adoption of model summits both within and alongside core teaching.
The ‘soft skills’ increasingly sought by employers, such as complex problem solving, leadership, public speaking, resilience, and active critical thinking, are core outputs of model summits that drive students towards fast-paced interactive learning. Embracing the use of model summits as both a teaching tool and an alternative mode of assessment presents opportunities for the enhancement of teaching and learning practice. It also provides students with the opportunity to extract key soft skills during their degree studies, potentially bridging the wider attainment gap for WP students.
