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Supporting students’ skills articulation

Dr Becky Lees and Victoria Walsh Kingston University

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Dr Becky Lees, Head of Department for Accounting, Finance and Informatic and Victoria Walsh, Course Director, Business Management and Senior Lecturer from Kingston University were speakers at PebbleBash 2024 and presented ‘From Literacy Skills to Skills Literacy: Supporting students’ skills articulation through PebblePad as an eportfolio tool.’ Click here to watch the video with the full transcript or if you’re having trouble viewing the video above.

 

-START TRANSCRIPT–

Welcome. Thank you very much for inviting us to be here, Nicole and everybody.

Becky Lee’s, my colleague over here is going to talk through, the application of how we’ve used, PebblePad, and I’m gonna introduce this this whole thing. My name is Victoria Walsh, and I am a course director at Kingston University. And for those who don’t know where Kingston is, we are nestled West London between, if you’re a rugby fan, Twickenham, a tennis fan, Wimbledon. So that’s where we are. And we’re going to talk about from literacy skills to skill literacy.

So, A lot of what, you know, we’re hearing over the last, you know, being a part of some of the workshops, just then, what I’ve heard already today is very much about this fact that we know that the modern university agenda is very much skills focused.

And within the business school where Becky and I both operate as academics, not necessarily as LTEC in terms of our learning and teaching support or the technology, we have been championing this for a long time.

And we know that there is this focus on skills, but what we we recognize is that it has to go further than that. And my course, was redesigned, revalidated to create a program a suite of programs for business management where we very much are taking it to the next level. We want to show that we are really embedding not just the skills into the, the curriculum, but that the ability to articulate and use that articulation to to to take people to the next level.

We see that in in literature, there is a lot of focus about, you know, making sure it’s about skills, but little is there about articulation. And we very much see our colleagues are starting to come on the journey with us within the business school and the wider university, but not so much about understanding that it isn’t enough to get people to do something. It’s about problem solving.

So what we were saying is we want to reorientate the thinking from literacy skills to skills literacy so that they have We bridge that gap about people who are understanding and noticing. Shane and I were talking about noticing the fact that they’re rec that they’re seeing a skill in action, and by the time they get to level six, so they can notice and then articulate that.

I say at the business school, we’ve been doing this for a long time. The university’s been doing it for a long time, but very much central to our university is our future skills program, very similar to Edinburgh.

It’s basically a consistent approach which has been rolled out throughout the whole university. And at every single course, every single level, we have a, navigate at level four, explore at level five, and, apply at level six, where we are really very much focusing on teaching students about skills and the importance of skills. So what we wanted to do, obviously, that So that how can we give them a framework to capture this, not just just tell them about it, do these workshops that we’ve got, but in the business school very much about how do we capture it in a framework.

 

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