Dr. Annika Newnham and Amanda Millmore from the School of Law have just had an article published in the journal Teaching & Learning Together in Higher Education, which was co-authored with 4 of their student partners – Megan Bennett, Jessica Davies, Thomas Fuller and Teresa Chew.

The article “Reflections on a Student-Staff Partnership: Collaborative Design of Module Assessments” charts their student-staff partnership when designing a new module, which is now the final year option Children, Families & the State (now in its second year).

The students designed the module’s assessments, which included them running focus groups of their fellow students. Not only did they create a more diverse range of assessments for this module, which includes an assessment which can be completed in different ways according to student preferences, but they also mapped each assessment to employability attributes making these explicit within the module. These employability attributes came out of an earlier project run in 2017/18 with stakeholders from alumni, employers, students and academics to find out which attributes were expected of a Reading Law graduate. One of the positive outcomes for students undertaking this module is that they have concrete examples of where they have displayed the various attributes from within the module, to be used in applications for jobs, placements and further study.

The student partners between them have presented this project at 3 different national conferences together with Amanda Millmore, including the high profile Advance HE Teaching & Learning Conference. Megan & Tom won a bursary to give a presentation about their work in Belfast in 2019 at the SEDA Conference. Now they have added to their own employability skills further by co-authoring a journal article.