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Inspiring engineers? student ambassadors and the importance of learning contexts in HE outreach activity
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Gartland, Clare |
| Copyright Year | 2012 |
| Abstract | Over the last decade employing student ambassadors has been increasingly popular in university outreach activity across the UK. Engineering skills are perceived as important to meet the demands of increasingly globalised economies and there has been a focus in outreach work on this subject area. The focus on increasing and widening participation in engineering in the UK has been driven by both the need to find new talent to sustain the British economy and by anticipated benefits to society as a whole. Ambassadors are widely held to be effective in aspiration and attainment-raising work and are frequently cited as role models for pupils by both policy-makers and practitioners. There is, however, no educational research into what pupils learn during interactions with students and whether ambassadors do contribute to increasing and widening participation in engineering. The focus of this paper is the impact of the learning contexts in which ambassadors worked on pupils' learning. The paper draws from a larger study of the outreach work of student ambassadors in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects. It deploys in depth ethnography drawing on approaches from across the social sciences to trace the discourses surrounding student ambassadors. The positioning of ambassadors, how this impacts on their relationships with pupils and the learning that takes place were considered using social psychology and grounded theory. Findings indicate that discourses employed by pupils, ambassadors and organisers relating to teaching and learning were notably different in different learning contexts. In learning contexts where ambassadors work as subject experts alongside pupils, pupils can identify closely with them as fellow students. In this capacity student ambassadors can contribute to inspiring young engineers and potentially disrupt and challenge pupils' gendered, raced and classed trajectories within engineering. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://oars.uos.ac.uk/587/1/Inspiring%20engineers.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
