Employability is often equated with graduate ability to become employed at graduate level. This is measured rather crudely by HESA, who ask graduates to complete a form a few months after their graduation, asking what they will be doing six months after graduation and if they would have been able to do this job without their course of study. These statistics are used to form a league table, which will become increasingly important for HE funding (and so will become increasingly important for your Vice Chancellor).
Creative Writing (like most Arts subjects) does not perform well on this measurement. Entry level employment in the Creative Industries is often unpaid or low paid placements, freelance work, or extremely short term project-based work. To complicate matters, many of our graduates’ employers will probably be small or micro enterprises, and these often also work on a short-term project basis, and are unlikely to offer anything but the smallest of wages and little or no training.
It’s no wonder that many of our graduates write ‘Pizza Hut’ (or the equivalent) as their answer to ‘what will you be doing’ and ‘No’ as their answer to ‘did you need your degree to do it?’
Whilst a different measurement might show a different story (2) (the English Subject Centre’s investigation into English graduates shows that after a period of three years, English graduates are employed at or above a comparatorsubject average (3)), what our subject might need is a different definition.
Consider Sheffield Hallam’s definition of employability. They decided that their institutional defi nition of employability was ‘enabling students to acquire the knowledge, personal and professional skills and encouraging the attitudes that will support their future development and employment.’ (4)
In a paper given at last year’s Enhancing Graduate Employability conference, (5) members of their ‘Employability Working Party’ said that they only added the fi nal two words at the last moment. (6)
If we were to use this definition in our subject, working to ‘enable students’ to ‘acquire skills’ and ‘attitudes’ to ‘support their future development’ is something I suspect Creative Writing faculty might consider not only uncontroversially desirable but also quite attainable. In fact, we might feel we are doing this work already, without dragging in uncomfortable notions of graduate employment.
Other institutions include ‘enterprise’ as well as ‘employment’ in their own defi nitions. ‘Enterprises’ might include writing fi ction or poetry. It might be running a magazine or a webzine, holding writing workshops, or helping a band with press releases and public relations. Enterprises might well be unwaged positions held by graduates which might or might not have the capacity to become waged at a later date, but which constitute their ‘graduate level employment’.
This is where graduate employment begins to feel less uncomfortable to our subject, and the word ‘employability’ shows possibilities of shrugging off its Thatcherite connotations. To achieve this, all we have to do is divorce our thinking about employability from rather crude notions of employment that no longer accurately reflect the working world.
If it is unlikely that a Creative Writing graduate will go directly into a life-long career in a subject-related industry, it is also unlikely that many other graduates will do the same. ‘Graduate jobs’, or entry-level positions with training and development, are quickly disappearing, and our notions of what is meant by ‘permanent employment’ are shifting. Jobs-for-life are neither expected nor desired by most new graduates, and typically companies who hire graduates in high numbers to fi ll lower level positions will not retain and promote the majority of these graduates (but will cap the salary range at a junior level and recruit more graduates to replace maturing employees with greater salary demands). (7)
The concept of ‘enterprise’ might cover a cocktail of graduate experience, in which even graduates employed in subject-related industries might feel themselves to be freelancing agents in a shifting world of opportunities and exploitation. This might be particularly true of arts graduates, who will typically have two (or more) occupations, the subject-related ‘enterprise’ (or enterprises), and paid employment (perhaps consisting of several part time jobs) that provides immediate income. (8)
The key to Creative Writing’s contribution to institutional performance in the league tables is the recognition of ‘enterprise’ as employment. This is a process of legitimising and acknowledging student (and practitioner) experience. If students were able to feel that their enterprises were valid and valued aspects of their lives, equal and interchangeable with employment, their answers on the HESA form might refl ect this, and the subject would perform better statistically.
Legitimising Student Experience
When discussing issues of employability in Creative Writing, the notion of ‘transferable skills’ is often quite promptly raised. Our subject has an enviable transferable skills list.
Creative Writing students are able to work to deadlines, both on their own and in collaborative groups. They can represent themselves and give and take criticism constructively in that group situation. They are able to write a wide variety of styles and genres and can tailor their writing for specifi c readerships. They have habits of evaluating their own work in written reports, are able to read text closely and interrogatively and are also largely self-motivating with high awareness of their own processes. To cap it all, they can also plan their own work and respond creatively to challenges.
These are abilities highly prized in the creative industries and, indeed, in any other form of business. You might expect, given such skills and attributes, that subject graduates would be much sought-after recruits and successful in any kind of private or public enterprise.
It’s not that there isn’t work out there. The creative industries make up the fastest growing sector of the UK economy and 7.9% of the UK GDP. (9) Indeed, Daniel Pink, the author of A Whole New Mind: How to Thrive in the new Conceptual Age (10), says that we are leaving the age of knowledge and entering the age of creativity. He lists ‘story’ as one of the ‘six essential aptitudes’.
So where does it all go wrong? Well, the problem with transferable skills, is that they don’t. Transfer, that is. People tend to associate a skill with the context in which it was learned. Take the Creative Writing workshop as an example. Many of the skills and abilities mentioned above are learned in workshop. But this is a very restricted setting, and students may feel these skills are uniquely valuable in this setting. Indeed, they may not be aware of the skills and attributes they have acquired. Some students interviewed in Steve May’s 2003 English Subject Centre Report felt that workshops were ‘fun’ but they didn’t ‘learn anything’ in them. (11)
Again, to quote Sheffield Hallam’s team, ‘The critical concepts underpinning employability in HE are transformation, the enhancing and empowering of students through knowledge and attribute acquisition, and the transfer of this to other contexts.’(12)
Elements that can effect this transformation include; (1) a sense of meta-cognition in their learning (learning what and how they have learned), (2) varied assessment strategies which make the students more aware of the learning process by asking them to perform different tasks with their skills and (3) practical support in transferring their skills from the classroom to other settings/contexts. Many institutions have relied on a ‘bolt-on’ provision for student transformation, in which the whole of the process is meant to take place in a single module during a work placement. If the student is fortunate in securing a placement in the creative industries, the third element of transformation may occur, but if the fi rst and the second are not present, it’s rather unlikely.
To reliably aid in student transformation, the three elements need to be thoroughly embedded in the curriculum.
Embedding Transformation in the Curriculum
Let’s work backwards on the list, taking the third (practical support in transferring their skills from the classroom to other settings/contexts) fi rst. This is probably the easiest of the three to address and it is also the most visible of what is needed to successfully legitimise student enterprise.
Many of Bath Spa University’s new initiatives in its BA curriculum are motivated and shaped by this need to support student transformation, and Artswork, the CETL at Bath Spa University, is engaged in studying the relationships between technology, creativity and employability.
The School of English and Creative Studies has introduced modules at every level encouraging students to begin putting their own writing into the context of the wider world. The first year module ‘Writing: The Process’ deals with practical aspects of writing (including fi le storage and work habits). This works to expand the setting of the skills from the classroom to the writing environment. We hope this will aid student recognition of skills and legitimise the process of skill acquisition and recognition by linking it to an assessment point.
Second year modules ‘Towards Publication’ and ‘Into Print’, are geared to enable students to begin habits of submission to appropriate publications (including researching the publication and finding the right contact person), appropriate to their current level of writing expertise. (There is a particular emphasis on learning to write feature articles.) Again, the aim is to legitimise student experience, this time by demonstrating that student have already attained skills that result in publishable writing.
Other Artswork modules, ‘Planning a Film’ and ‘Making a Film’, require a pitch to an industry commissioner to progress from one module to the other, again asking students to think about their work in context. This emphasises their role as a beginning practitioner in an established industry.
Our third year has been reshaped to allow students much more variety in the kinds of projects they undertake and students concentrate on their own projects in their fi nal semester. An Artswork module called ‘Creative Enterprise’ assists students who feel ready to initiate a project in the wider world. Successful projects have included making fi lms for the local council, starting a surf wear company, investigating commissioning routes for situation comedy and coordinating part of the recent celebrations for John Betjeman’s centenary.
It is here that the legitimising of student experience is perhaps most noticeable and effective, as when we began opening up the assignments permissible for project modules we found that many of these students were already working on these projects in their spare time, without any faculty support and without being assessed for their work.
It’s too early to give hard data as to how successful these initiatives have been. However, case studies and anecdotal evidence are causing us to feel optimistic about the changes. Nearly 60% of the second year students on last year’s pilot of the ‘Towards Publication’ and ‘Into Print’ modules achieved publication. Publications included teen magazine Sugar, local newspapers, and specialist consumer magazines such as Origami Times, Kerrang and Cat World.
Now, it might be said this kind of thing is lowering the bar, that we weaken subject attainment in our students by encouraging achievements of such mediocrity. Interaction with the wider world of the creative industries can be seen as undesirable, as too much reliance on industry notions of excellence (rather than literary notions of excellence) could weaken the subject.
It is here that number two on our list is useful (varied assessment). These initiatives are not designed to replace current curriculum, but to add variety to the way we assess student skills.
Few students may be ready to write a novel, a collection of poetry or a feature length script whilst studying at undergraduate level, but all of our students should be able to write a short feature for an undemanding journal or contribute a story or poem to a start-up webzine. Many assessments are consistently linked to tasks with practical outcomes generally unattainable at the level of students’ skills (i.e. writing and marketing a novel), and assessment tasks of writing and writing-about-writing tended to be intensely context-linked.
However useful and important these assessment tasks might be on a subject level, consistent concentration on unattainable outcomes does not work to legitimise student experience. A variety of assessment tasks, which links some to attainable outcomes and some to aspirational outcomes, will better serve Creative Writing students. This way we can continue to provide the excellent education our subject delivers, whilst also helping students to make their transitions from the institution to the wider world.
Variety itself is also important. Each time we ask students to think about their skills in another way, with a different mode of expression or emphasis (whether in a process journal, director’s notes, or an essay comparing their writing to a canonical writer), we are making them more aware of the learning process and helping them divide their skills from the context in which the skills were acquired.
This brings us to number one (a sense of meta-cognition in their learning). When students question the assessment strategy for any given module, it is an ideal time for faculty to spend a few moments talking to students about the reasoning behind assessments. This learning-about-learning need not take up a signifi cant portion of class time, but may be quite valuable for students, helping them to understand the process of education they are undergoing.
For example:
• ‘We want you to submit stories in two genres so that you can apply the things you’ve learned in more than one way. This should help you understand that what you’ve done well in one story, you can do in others.’
• ‘We think the process journal will help you examine and remember how you achieved results in your project.’
• ‘The critical commentary asks you to think about the strengths and weaknesses in your writing. We think this helps your ability to edit your own work.’
There may be other opportunities, in workshop for example, where it would also be easy to talk about the learning process the students are undergoing.
Many of us will already be doing this, but may not recognise how it helps students engage actively with the curriculum or be aware of the need to do it consistently in order to assist student transformation. In all three of these strategies to enable student transformation, faculty awareness is the key to success, but it is perhaps most noticeable in issues of meta-cognition, where classroom practice is essential for delivery. Successful delivery of such concepts, and indeed embedding help towards transformation into Creative Writing curriculum and increasing student employability in general, is dependent on faculty awareness and attitudes.
Faculty Awareness and Attitudes
Staff in Creative Writing arrive in the academy on many varied routes, but from two main career directions. Many lecturers studied to Ph.D. standard in English Literature, but also had interest and ability in Creative Writing. As Creative Writing became a subject in its own right, some of these lecturers moved wholly over to Creative Writing, whilst others continued to lecture both in English and Creative Writing. Faculty in Creative Writing can also be practitioners of Creative Writing, with a less academic background or with an academic background in an unrelated subject, who have discovered in themselves (sometimes through placements and workshops in schools or community education) an aptitude for teaching. (13)
The play between these two career directions greatly enriches the teaching delivery in the subject, as students are provided with many different approaches to the task of writing. It also provokes interesting debates amongst faculty on issues of employability, especially amongst colleagues who come in at the edges of the Academic-Practitioner continuum.
For example, a recent conversation at my own institution went like this:
A: ...and there might be opportunity for our students to get involved in writing advertising or marketing copy.
B: I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.
A: Why?
B: You could make a good case that advertising is inherently unethical. I’m not sure we want to be training our students to write it.
A: Well, um, surely that’s up to them to decide. If they want it, we should be providing it.
B: Should we? If they want to write child pornography, should we provide a module in it?
Now, this is an amusing conversation. Both of the lecturers were amused even whilst having it. And though we don’t want to reduce the varied career paths into the subject to a crude binary, any Creative Writing faculty member reading this document, though amused, will probably also fi nd themselves drawn to one side or another of the argument (or, more confusingly, to both). But more, it brings up an important issue regarding faculty awareness and the delivery of curriculum with elements of employability.
At an employability conference, I once sat through a plenary address by the chairman of a large fi nancial software development company. He assumed all the delegates would want their students to fi nd (extremely well paid jobs) with his company and told us exactly what we needed to teach them so that they could. In the following discussion group, the other delegates concentrated on ways for faculty to better understand the needs of their associated industries. The universal idea (Humanities representation is notoriously low at such events) was that curriculum and HE in general existed mainly to service the needs of industry.
But, as a Danish business lecturer pointed out in informal discussion at the break, this is like ‘peeing in your pants to keep warm’, a shortsighted strategy for graduate employability (not to speak of the catastrophic effect it could have on subject development). Even if Creative Writing were to scrap all notions of literary excellence that were not directly validated by, say, the publishing industry, trying to develop curriculum for the needs of the creative industries is an impossible task. These industries are volatile and driven by fashions and trends: curriculum change is slow. With the best will in the world to sell out, a year to develop curriculum and three years to deliver it to students would mean a four year gap between understanding industry agenda and the delivery of agenda-ready graduates. By this time, the industry would think it wanted something different. How many witchcraft-school fantasies for 9-12s do you think you could sell a commissioning editor now? Yet four years ago, every children’s’ press was crying out for them.
Given all this, it was with great relief that I found Neil Moreland. (14) Moreland (whose subject is Sociology) suggests “ways in which the employability agenda and actions can be colonised for critical pedagogic activities”. And it is here I’d like to return to the conversation between A and B, and suggest ways in which we may support our students’ future development. Instead of either embracing market values or attempting to protect our students from them, we can utilise the wide ability and experience of our varied faculty to both (a) inform our students about and help to instil skills valuable to the creative industries (which may include the ability to write advertising copy) and (b) critically interrogate such industries (which may include asking if advertising is inherently unethical).
It is this combination of approaches which will enable our students to make intelligent and informed choices about their future development, to be as Moreland said in his talk, ‘streetwise and canny freelancers’. And it is this variety of approaches our subject is well equipped to deliver.
Creative Writing staff have both pragmatic, market-led information about the creative industries and the ability to think critically about these same industries. Again, faculty members on the edges of the Practice/Academic continuum might fi nd one much easier than the other, but the important thing is that the students are exposed to both ways of thinking about the wider world of writing and publishing/broadcasting et al during their degree. The more knowledgeable our students are, and the more critically they can think about these industries, the better prepared they will be to get what they want/can from them and to protect themselves from economic exploitation.
Again, this is work we are already doing in the classroom. Whenever we explain why a book received a big marketing budget or talk about why a good manuscript did not fi nd a publisher, we are doing this kind of teaching. It is only a matter of recognising what this discourse is doing in terms of our students’ future development and perhaps putting a slightly greater emphasis on conveying such information consistently that may be necessary. It’s not an impossible task to integrate into teaching, especially if staff are aware that such topics can assist student transformation.
In this, as in much of Creative Writing, many elements which have been shown to support student employability are already common in subject delivery. Our main task is in this work of recognition. If we increase our awareness of issues of student transformation, we will ensure our students are well prepared - no matter what they may decide to do or how that may be measured. We can also make a good case (at institution level and beyond) that we have the issue of employability in hand, and ask for support for our own methods of subject development and delivery in relation to these issues.
As a subject, Creative Writing is well placed to ‘colonise’ the issues and agendas associated with employability. Staff can use the employability agenda to further strengthen the excellence of our teaching and the development of our discipline.
Notes
1. Artswork is the CETL at Bath Spa University, investigating Creativity, Technology and Employability. The Broadcast Lab is a state of the art editing suite in a fourteenth century castle gatehouse. For the School of English and Creative Studies at Bath Spa University, it functions as a portal to the wider world, allowing our students to put their work into the context of contemporary film and broadcast media.
2. HESA is piloting a measurement which takes place three years after graduation.
3. John Brennan and Ruth Williams with Zsuzso Blaskó, The English Degree and Graduate Careers, English Subject Centre Report, Series 2, 2003 4. Sheffield Hallam, 2002.
5. ‘Developing an Employability Framework: an institutional approach,’ Simon Brown and Sue Drew, Sheffield Hallam University.
7. Tamsin Bowers-Brown, with Lee Harvey, 2004, ‘Are there too many graduates in the UK? A literature review and an analysis of graduate employability.’ Industry and Higher Education, August, pp. 243-54.
8. One of the respondents to my Employability Survey of third year students at Bath Spa University wrote that their future employment would be ‘baking and writing’.
9. Developing Entrepreneurship for the Creative Industries; The Role of Higher and Further Education, Department for Culture Media and Sport, Creative Industries Division, 2006.
10. A Whole New Mind: How to Thrive in the New Conceptual Age, Daniel H Pink, Riverhead Books (in association with Penguin, New York) 2005.
11. Teaching Creative Writing at Undergraduate Level: Why, How and Does it Work?, English Subject Centre Mini Project, Steve May for the English Subject Centre and Higher Education Academy, 2003.
13. Anyone interested in Creative Writing and its relationship with English Literature in the academy would enjoy reading Paul Dawson’s Creative Writing and the New Humanities, Routledge, New York, 2005.
14. ‘A Political and Moral Economy of Employability’, Neil Moreland, Research Fellow, ESECT, The Open University
