Description
Teaching academic skills as part of a politics degree is often a challenging task with both student engagement and attendance key issues to overcome. Solutions to these issues, such as integrating academic skills training into pre-existing taught programmes and content that have a compulsory and/or assessed element have often been perceived as the only viable route to improve engagement with this important area of a students life cycle in Higher Education.
This paper argues that this solution is not the only pathway to achieving effective student engagement and learning with academic skills and may in fact undermine some of the key attributes of academic skills, such as genuine reflective learning. Based on the design and evolution of a non-compulsory academic skills course that ran alongside pre-existing programme content, as well as two years data on engagement and feedback, it establishes that academic skills teaching in a politics degree can be effective if designed and framed around a teaching technique that combines both humour and political scandal.
The paper argues that students engage with academic skills content when it is made directly relevant to their perceived purpose in studying a politics degree and that this initial engagement can be reinforced by the careful use of humour in establishing real-world relevance to the academic skills they are being introduced to. This semi-reflective paper makes the case for a student centred approach to teaching academic skills that challenges the move towards generalisation of ‘skills’ within Higher Education.
